System and method to detect video quality degradation in a video stream received by a telecommunications endpoint, the method including: locating reference features characteristic of content in the received video stream; calculating reduced reference features from the located reference features; receiving reduced reference features of a transmitted video stream, the transmitted video stream corresponding to the received video stream; calculating a distance between the reduced reference features in the received video stream and the reduced reference features of the transmitted video stream; and detecting video quality degradation when the calculated distance exceeds a predetermined threshold.