A NEW VIDEO QUALITY ASSESSMENT DATASET FOR VIDEO SURVEILLANCE

APPLICATIONS

Azeddine Beghdadi⋆ , Muhammad Ali Qureshi† , Borhen-eddine Dakkar⋆ , Hammad Hassan Gillani† ,
Zohaib Amjad Khan†† , Mounir Kaaniche⋆ , Mohib Ullah‡ , Faouzi Alaya Cheikh‡
⋆
University Sorbonne Paris Nord, France
†
The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Pakistan
††
L2S, CentraleSupélec, University Paris Saclay, France
‡
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway

ABSTRACT of the critical factors that impact the performance of video

In this paper, we propose a new comprehensive Video Surveil-
lance Quality Assessment Dataset (VSQuAD) dedicated to
Video Surveillance (VS) systems. In contrast to other pub-
lic datasets, this one contains many more videos with distor-
tions and diversified content from common video surveillance
scenarios. These videos have been artificially degraded with
various types of distortions (single distortion or multiple dis-
tortions simultaneously) at different severity levels. In order
to improve the efficiency of the surveillance systems and the
versatility of the video quality assessment dataset, night vi-
sion CCTV videos are also included. Furthermore, a compre-
hensive analysis of the content in terms of diversity and chal-
lenging problems is also presented in this study. The interest
of such database is twofold. First, it will serve for bench-
marking different video distortion detection and classification
algorithms. Second, it will be useful for the design of learning
models for various challenging VS problems such as identi-
fication and removal of the most common distortions. The
complete dataset is made publicly available as part of a chal-
lenge session in this conference through the following link:
https://www.l2ti.univ-paris13.fr/VSQuad/.
Index Terms— Video Surveillance, Video Quality As-
sessment, Video Dataset, Distortion generation.
1. INTRODUCTION
Video Surveillance (VS) is a subject of applied research
that is currently undergoing a lot of technological changes
and progress, especially with emerging technologies includ-
ing high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and
smart sensors. Problems with public security have sparked
significant concern in recent years. Security and monitoring
systems are more and more demanding in terms of quality,
reliability and flexibility especially those dedicated to video
surveillance. However, despite the tremendous progress al-
ready made towards the development of efficient security
systems, the existing solutions have limitations especially in
complex and cluttered environments. Video quality is one
surveillance systems. Indeed, various in-capture distortions
(Blur, Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN), Uneven-
illumination, Smoke, atmospheric turbulence, etc.), trans-
mission impairments (packet-loss, channel noice, etc.), or
compression artifacts are among the limiting factors of video
surveillance systems. These distortions may affect the per-
formance of the prominent high-level tasks such face/event
detection, recognition, and tracking process [1]. Therefore,
it is important to integrate the video quality aspect in the de-
sign of any video surveillance system [2]. It is worth noting
that the lack of database dedicated to the evaluation of video
quality in the context of video surveillance has somewhat hin-
dered the advancement of research in the field of intelligent
video surveillance systems.
Furthermore, apart from a few very limited studies, most
databases for the evaluation of video quality have focused
for more than two decades on coding and transmission ef-
fects. Nevertheless, some interesting video databases includ-
ing other distortions have been proposed for video quality
evaluation, such as CVD2014 [3], KoNViD-1k [4], LIVE-
Qualcomm [5], and LIVE-VQC [6]. We have also seen some
recent interesting work on Video Quality Assessment (VQA)
based on deep learning [7]. But, to the best of our knowledge,
there is no or very little work devoted to the evaluation of
video quality in the context of video surveillance [8]. One
of the issues that arises in the design of an intelligent video
surveillance system is the robustness of the algorithms ded-
icated to high-level tasks, such as abnormal event detection
[9], people re-identification [10] and visual tracking [11],
against the effect of in-capture distortions [2].
With the renewed interest in artificial intelligence-based ap-
proaches to solve computer vision and image processing and
analysis problems, we are witnessing the development of
huge datasets. This is, for example, the case of video datasets
dedicated to VQA methods benchmarking [12]. The video
surveillance context generates huge amounts of data, which
is naturally in line with the current trend of big data analysis.
The quality of a video especially in the surveillance context
has a prime role in designing a smart surveillance system. The
proposed dataset namely Video Surveillance Quality Assess-
ment Dataset (VSQuAD) is the continuation of [8]. This new
database is not only much larger, about five times, but con-
tains more scenarios and other types of distortions, especially
those related to atmospheric conditions. This database, apart
from the primary objective of evaluating the performance
of distortion detection and classification algorithms and the
evaluation of video quality metrics, is of primary interest for
the benchmarking of various high-level task algorithms.
2. THE PROPOSED DATASET-VSQUAD
The proposed dataset contains 36 original high-definition
videos with diverse contents and 28 scenarios. Nine common
single distortions are applied at 4 levels of severity to these
videos. This dataset also contains simultaneous distortions at
different levels of severity. The dataset contains 1, 576 videos
affected with single and simultaneous distortions. All the
videos are 10 seconds duration each captured at 30 frames
per second. The detailed summary of the proposed dataset is
provided in Table 1.
3. DISTORTION GENERATION
Here, we briefly discuss the methods to generate the differ-
ent distortions. In our experiments, the distortions are gener-
ated in a semi- or fully artificial way with four severity levels,
namely, (1) just noticeable, (2) not annoying but visible, (3)
annoying, (4) very annoying. Note that the distortions are sep-
arately applied for each color channel in RGB video frames.
3.1. Artificial distortions
Noise: It is one of the most encountered distortions during
video acquisition, or transmission systems, and especially in
night-video or low-light environments. The most probable
cause of noise during acquisition is due to camera sensors
sensitivity. We simulated the noise in our dataset by using
the basic additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) model. By
changing the variance various levels of noise are generated on
each frame of the video stream.
Defocus-Blur: A video may suffer from blur due to defocus
during the image capture. This results in a decrease of the im-
age contrast [13] that manifests itself as sharpness decreases.
The blur due to defocus can be generated at various levels by
applying a low-pass Gaussian filter to the input image with a
variable mask size relates to the standard deviation of the im-
pulse response of the filter.
Motion-Blur: In the case of video, motion blur is mainly due
to the relatively low image acquisition rate compared to the
speed of the objects filmed, the instability of the camera, or
the photonic sensitivity of the image sensor. A simple way
to generate this type of blur is to perform a directional low-
pass filtering such as a directional moving-average filter. By
varying the parameters of the kernel, i.e., the direction and the
extent, we generated a directional blur at four severity levels.
Low Illumination: Despite the progress made in the sensi-
tivity and resolution of image sensors, the problem of lighting
remains a limiting factor in the performance of video surveil-
lance systems. Low lighting conditions can make high level
tasks very challenging. To synthesize such kind of distortion
we adopted a simple multiplicative model that consists of uni-
formly attenuating the pixel values.
Uneven Illumination: It is due to non-uniform illumination
(UI) that manifests itself by the appearance of unbalanced
dark and light areas which makes object detection and inter-
pretation of the observed scene difficult. This degradation can
be simulated by weighting the pixel values of each frame by
a fading mask of the same size as the image, with weights be-
tween 0 and 1 of the bell-shaped spatial distribution of Gaus-
sian or log-Gaussian type. By moving the principal lobe of the
fading mask function various UI effects could be generated on
the sides rather than the center of the frame to produce a re-
alistic effect. Figure 1 (a) presents video frames with single
artificial distortion.
3.2. Semi-artificial distortions
The generation of some atmospheric distortions or other phys-
ical turbulence is a very challenging problem. For example,
the use of Perlin noise model for smoke generation may be in-
effective. Indeed, because it is difficult to simulate the move-
ments of the particles and at the same time to control the
phenomenon of light scattering in a realistic way. The same
problem arises for the generation of other similar atmospheric
degradations such as haze or rain. Here we use a semi artifi-
cial scheme to generate those distortions in a realistic way.
It is based on the screen blending technique [14]. The origi-
nal frames were blended with a real distortion video using the
blending model given below (1):
Fout = 1 − (1 − Forig )(1 − αFdist ) (1)
where Fout , Forig , Fdist are resultant, reference, and distor-
tion frames respectively and α is the blending factor.
Smoke: It is one of the distortions that may affect the qual-
ity of the video in the outdoor environments. Smoke is the
most challenging distortion to model. A video having only
the smoke with black background is blended with the original
video frames. By changing the opacity level of the smoke,
different levels of smoke distortion are generated.
Haze: Haze is another distortion widely studied in computer
vision and more particularly in navigation problems. This dis-
tortion affects the whole image in a more or less uniform way.
Here again, we used the blending method to produce videos
affected by haze in a realistic way. By varying the opacity of
the Haze-only video we may generate different levels.
 Table 1. Summary of the proposed surveillance video quality assessment dataset
Year 2022 Number of Reference 36
Videos
Categories (Vision) 2 RGB (Day-light / Night- Camera Type (Modalities) 2 (Fixed/Moving)
light)
Scenario Types 2 (Indoor, Outdoor) Number of scenarios 28
Resolution of each video FHD (1920 × 1080) Duration of each video 10 seconds
Number of distortion types 9 Number of distortion lev- 4
els
Distortion Types (D1 ) Defocus Blur, (D2 ) Haze, (D3 ) Low illumination, (D4 ) Motion Blur (due to cam-
era instability), (D5 ) AWGN, (D6 ) Rain, (D7 ) Smoke, (D8 ) Uneven-illumination, (D9 )
Compression artifact
Multi-distortion Yes, 9 common mixtures Frame rate 30 fps
Multi-distortion order D1 D5 , D3 D5 , D5 D8 , D3 D6 , D1 D9 , D3 D5 D6 , D5 D8 D9 , D4 D6 D8 , D2 D5 D9
Number of videos with sin- 964 Number of videos affected 612
gle distortion each by more than one distor-
tion
Type .mp4 Size (in GB) 34 GB

(a) Video frames with single artificial distortion (D1 , D3 , D4 , D5 , D8 )

(b) Video frames with single semi-artificial distortion (D2 , D6 , D7 , D9 )

(c) Video frames with multi-distortions (D1 D9 , D3 D6 , D2 D5 D9 )

Fig. 1. Examples of distorted versions of videos from VSQuAD.

Rain: Significant intensity variations in videos due to rain
may degrade the performance of outdoor surveillance. The
generation of videos containing rain at different density lev-
els is also obtained by following the same process as in the
case of haze and smoke. By varying the α parameter values
we generated different levels of rain density.
Compression Artifacts: Various artifacts due to the com-
pression or the transmission channel can affect the quality of
the videos. In this study we consider mainly the blocking
artefact resulting from FFmpeg coding at four quality levels.
Figure 1 (b) presents video frames with single semi-artificial
distortion.
3.3. Multiple Distortion Generation
The process of generating mixtures of simultaneous distor-
tions is purely intuitive and is based on an additive or mul-
tiplicative model where the different terms are weighted ac-
cording to the importance of one distortion component over
the others. It is worth noticing that the order of application of
the different synthetic distortions must take into account the
physical reality and in particular the way in which the signal
is acquired by the sensors in real scenarios, e.g., if we gener-
ate noise on a video and then apply the blur, the effect of noise
would be affected by lowpass filtering effect due to blurring.
Figure 1 (c) presents examples of video frames with multiple
distortions.
4. DATASET CHARACTERISTICS ANALYSIS
It is important to have different scenarios but also visual con-
tents rich in spatio-temporal structures at different scales of
observation and under various lighting and viewing angles.
The richness or diversity in videos is computed through spa-
tial and spatio-temporal descriptors. A set of criteria and mea-
sures to quantify and analyze the richness and representative-
 (a) SI versus CF (b) GCF versus CF
Fig. 2. Scatter plots for VSQuAD. The symbol ’⋆’ represents the keyframes of reference videos.
ness of image and video databases dedicated to perceptual
quality assessment has been proposed in [15, 16]. In what
follows we will recall some of these descriptors and apply
them to the analysis of the database.
4.1. Spatial descriptors
Spatial descriptors can be defined in the spatial or transformed
domain and at different resolution levels. In what follows we
limit ourselves to a few simple spatial descriptors such as Col-
orfulness (CF), Spatial Information (SI), and Global Contrast
Factor (GCF) associated with each frame as done in [16]. Fig-
ures 2 (a) and (b) show the scatter plots for the keyframes of
reference videos demonstrating that the proposed dataset is
enriched with diversified colors, contrast, and texture.
4.2. Saptio-temporal Descriptors
The perceptual quality of a video is very much influenced
by spatio-temporal information and in particular by moving
and visually attractive objects and structures. [17]. One of
the characteristics that allow analyzing the video signal is the
motion parameter. There are several methods for estimating
the motion field in dynamic scenes. Here we use a global
measure of motion information characterizing the richness of
the video signal in terms of time-varying visual content. We
used the spatiotemporal perceptual information proposed in
the VQEG group recommendation [17].
4.2.1. Spatial perceptual information:
As a spatial descriptor, we consider the edginess information
that represents the most visually salient component in the im-
age signal at a given scale. The spatial information is thus
defined from the response of an enhancement operator of the
salient features of the image signal and more particularly the
contours. Here, we adopt the Sobel operator as a filter to
enhance these components as done in [17]. For each video
frame (Fn ) a Sobel filter is applied. The standard deviation of
the magnitude of Sobel response is then computed over each
(c) TI versus SI
frame. The maximum value over time is used to represent the
spatial information content of the scene. The SI measure is:
SI = maxn {std[Sobel(Fn )]} (2)
4.2.2. Temporal perceptual information:
The local temporal perceptual information denoted Mn (i, j)
captures the motion difference feature at the location (i, j).
It is defined as the difference between the pixel values at the
same location in successive frames. It is computed as follows:
Mn (i, j) = Fn (i, j) − Fn−1 (i, j) (3)
where Fn (i, j) is the pixel value at the (i, j) location of nth
frame. The TI measure is computed as the maximum over
time (n) of the standard deviation over space of inter-frame
difference Mn :
TI = maxn {std[Mn ]} (4)
Videos with high motion results in higher TI values.
Figure 2 (c) presents a scatter plot of the spatio-temporal
perceptual information SI and TI measures on videos from
the proposed dataset. It is observed, that our dataset contains
some scenes with very limited motion as well as with a lot of
motion. It is clear that this database contains rather diversi-
fied spatiotemporal information. The richness of this database
guarantees the reliability of the study and its possible use in
various applications particularly the impact of the common
distortions on the quality of videos and high-level tasks.
5. CONCLUSION AND PERSPECTIVES
The proposed database fills a gap in this very active field of
research. Indeed, consideration of video quality in the con-
text of video surveillance has been somewhat neglected. This
unique database will be used not only for applications related
to video quality but also as a benchmark to evaluate video
classification methods especially in very challenging contexts
thanks to the specificity of its visual content and to the distor-
tions within the videos.
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