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.
In subjective video quality tests, typically, SRCs ("Sources", i.e. original video sequences) are treated with various conditions (HRCs for "Hypothetical Reference Circuits") to generate PVSs ("Processed Video Sequences").[1]