Objective Analysis of HDTV H.264 x MPEG-2 with and Without Packet Loss

This article aims to compare video quality between H.264 and MPEG-2 compression methods through an objective analysis. The method used to assess the video in the test is through comparison with the reference video. The tests were conducted using Picture Quality Analysis (PQA) equipment. The PQA has the following methods for an objective evaluation: Picture Quality Rating (PQR) and Differential Mean Opinion Score (DMOS). The PQR and DMOS methods are objective evaluations approaching subjective evaluations. By only analyzing the video compression imperfections, i.e., no packet loss, it can be seen that H.264 presents video quality equivalent to MPEG-2 with a transmission rate about two times smaller. However, the study completed for this article relates to video quality with packet loss in the transport layer of the ISDB-T B transmission system, this shows that H.264 suffers a bigger loss in video quality than MPEG-2 with the same value in relation to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the transmission channel, into the ISDB-T B receiver. To generate error packets in the transmission, white noise was added between the transmitted and received signal. The test results show that H.264 provides superior video quality when compared to MPEG-2, with no packet loss, but with packet loss, MPEG-2 provides better video quality than H.264.