Quality assessment using data hiding on perceptually important areas

In this paper, we present a no-reference video quality metric that blindly estimates the quality of a video. The proposed approach makes use of a data hiding technique to embed a fragile mark into perceptually important areas of the video frame. To estimate the importance of an area, we take into account three perceptual features that are known to attract visual attention: motion, contrast, and color. At the receiver, the mark is extracted from the perceptually important areas of the decoded video. Then, a quality measure of the video is obtained by computing the degradation of the extracted mark. Simulation results indicate that the proposed video quality metric outperforms standard peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) in estimating the perceived quality of a video. Additionally, results from a subjective experiment show that the metric output values increase monotonically with the mean annoyance scores gathered from the human observers.