Image quality assessment based on multiple watermarking approach

Automatic monitoring of image/video quality is very important in modern multimedia communication services. We are interested in digital watermarking as a promising approach to image quality assessment without reference to the original image. The proposed methodology makes use of wavelet-based embedding of multiple watermarks with robustness control in order to capture the degree of the degradation undergone by a received image. The watermark robustness is controlled through 1) embedding and detection of multiple watermarks, 2) multi-resolution and directional subband selection, 3) perceptual watermark weighting and 4) fine watermark strength adjustment process. At the receiver end, the detection or lack of detection of the watermarks in a received image are used to estimate image´s PSNR range and determine its associated quality attribute. Simulation results show the efficiency of such watermarking scheme in assessing the quality level of test images under JPEG compression.