What They Say
Ssimwave has won its second Emmy Award for work in Development of Perceptual Metrics for Video Encoding Optimization. The firm’s Ssimplus incorporates characteristics of the human visual system and produces an objective score for any video across networks and devices.
What We Think
Finding an objective way of measuring video image quality. I have been interested in that topic for some time and met with the firm at IBC in 2019. I didn’t get to connect with anybody from the technical side, so can’t say that I really understand what it is doing, exactly. I assume that it builds on the SSIM metric, but that was built on work on still images. Still, winning a couple of Emmys suggests that those that know more about this like the firm’s technology.
Of course, the adage ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ is really significant for video service providers, either via OTT or by broadcast. You can find out when you are failing to achieve the level of quality that you want, but can also optimise to avoid spending money on ‘excess quality’.
Having a ‘set maker’ mentality, I asked Ssimwave at IBC in 2019 if they could also quantify the quality of video processing within a TV and the firm said it could. It seems to me that even if the results weren’t published, that process would be useful. But I’d also love to see some comparison between brands. I have my own idea of who is best at video processing, but putting some numbers would be interesting! (BR)
