Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) is an engineering term for the ratio between the maximum possible power of a signal and the power of corrupting noise that affects the fidelity of its representation. Because many signals have a very wide dynamic range, PSNR is usually expressed as a logarithmic quantity using the decibel scale.
PSNR is commonly used to quantify reconstruction quality for images and video subject to lossy compression.
Subjective video quality is video quality as experienced by humans. It is concerned with how video is perceived by a viewer (also called "observer" or "subject") and designates their opinion on a particular video sequence. It is related to the field of Quality of Experience. Measuring subjective video quality is necessary because objective quality assessment algorithms such as PSNR have been shown to correlate poorly with subjective ratings. Subjective ratings may also be used as ground truth to develop new algorithms.
Subjective video quality tests are psychophysical experiments in which a number of viewers rate a given set of stimuli. These tests are quite expensive in terms of time (preparation and running) and human resources and must therefore be carefully designed.
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