REAL-TIME EVALUATION OF COMPRESSED PICTURE QUALITY WITHIN A DIGITAL VIDEO ENCODER

Method, system and computer program product are provided for real time evaluation of compressed picture quality, in hardware, software or a combination thereof, during encoding of a sequence of video data. A received video signal is encoded by quantizing the signal after frequency transformation to produce a quantized video signal which is automatically evaluated in real time for data loss. Loss statistics, representative of picture quality of the quantized video signal, are generated for comparison with, for example, a predefined threshold as a dynamic control over outputting of the quantized video signal to the encode pipeline. As an enhancement, multiple quantizers are employed in parallel, each using a different quantization scale to produce multiple different quantization signals. The multiple quantization signals are evaluated in real time for picture quality and an optimum signal is selected for forwarding within the encode pipeline.