Evaluation of packet loss impairment on streaming video

Video compression technologies are essential in video streaming application because they could save a great amount of network resources. However compressed videos are also extremely sensitive to packet loss which is inevitable in today’s best effort IP network. Therefore we think accurate evaluation of packet loss impairment on compressed video is very important. In this work, we develop an analytic model to describe these impairments without the reference of the original video (NR) and propose an impairment metric based on the model, which takes into account both impairment length and impairment strength. To evaluate an impaired frame or video, we design a detection and evaluation algorithm (DE algorithm) to compute the above metric value. The DE algorithm has low computational complexity and is currently being implemented in the real-time monitoring module of our HDTV over IP system. The impairment metric and DE algorithm could also be used in adaptive system or be used to compare different error concealment strategies.