SS-SSIM and MS-SSIM for digital cinema applications

One of the key issues for a successful roll out of digital cinema is in the quality it offers. The most practical and least expensive way of measuring quality of multimedia content is through the use of objective metrics. In addition to the widely used objective quality metric peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), recently other metrics such as single scale structural similarity (SS-SSIM) and multi scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) have been claimed as good alternatives for estimation of perceived quality by human subjects. The goal of this paper is to verify by means of subjective tests the validity of such claims for digital cinema content and environment.