An objective method of measuring texture preservation for camcorder performance evaluation

Abstract

This paper presents a method for evaluating the performance of camcorders in terms of texture preservation, taking into account the contrast sensitivity function of human visual system. A quality metric called texture preservation ratio (TPR) is the outcome of the method. It quantifies to what extent texture structures are preserved in a video recorded by a camcorder. In our experiments, we used the dead leaves chart to simulate a scene with textures of different scales. The dead leaves chart is known as a good target for testing purposes because it is invariant to scaling, translation, rotation, and contrast (exposure) adjustment. Experimental results have shown the following observations on five tested camcorders from three different vendors: 1) the TPR value decreases monotonically with respect to the motion speed; 2) the TPR value increases monotonically with respect to the lossy compression bitrates. Thereby, our study has confirmed TPR as a useful indicator for measuring a camcorder's performance in terms of preserving textures.

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