Abstract: This paper presents a saliency variation based full-reference objective quality assessment metric for packet-loss-impaired videos. The method explores the application of visual saliency information. Motivated by the observation that packet-loss induced errors often change the spatial-temporal visual attention and correspondingly the saliency map, we explore the spatial changes in the saliency values between the original and distorted videos, and the temporal variation of the saliency map of the distorted video. The proposed metric was tested on 17 packet-loss-impaired videos and evaluated by a subjective test. Experiment results showed that the proposed method provides significant improvement in correlation with subjective results over traditional non-saliency quality metrics and the saliency/ROI (region of interest) weighted pixel-error quality measurements. This demonstrates that saliency variation is effective in evaluating the perceptual quality of videos affected by packet loss induces errors.