The purpose of an objective video quality evaluation is to automatically assess the quality of video sequences in agreement with human quality perception. The invention addresses the effects of the introduction of a temporal dimension by focusing on the temporal evolutions of spatial distortions, since it has been found that a spatial quality variation cannot be evaluated by simple subtraction of the spatial quality of neighbouring frames. An improved method for estimating perceived video quality comprises steps of calculating a first similarity map between adjacent frames of a current sequence, calculating a second similarity map between the corresponding reference frames, and calculating (smg3) a third similarity map, which provides a numerical quality value.