I've been researching the video quality standards and have been learning about a little known agency of the US Department of Commerce – the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, in Boulder CO.
The ITS has been active in development of video standards including several ANSI standards that also contribute to ITU recommendations. ITS was established in the 1940s as a radio propagation lab as part of the National Bureau of Standards in the US Dept of Commerce. The ITS, as the research and engineering branch of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration also offers interesting resources including this cool chart of the US Spectrum Allocation.
The ITS has conducted a subjective analysis of video quality for public safety applications study and is busy writing Statement of Requirements for video surveillance and mobile radio systems.
They've also written and offer for free download an automated video analysis application that embodies a measurement paradigm called 'reduced-reference' video quality measurement. The ANSI T1.801.03-2003 incorporates the ITS' three patents on the method and algorithm and is the basis for the ITU reference ITU J.144 "Objective perceptual video quality measurement techniques for digital cable television in the presence of a full reference."
The interesting thing about the ITS' Video Quality Measurement technology is that it performed so very well in international subjective testing comparisons – at the 95% correlation level.
