On the Use of Objective Quality Measures to Estimate Watermarked Audio Quality

This paper compares two objective audio quality assessment measures calculated for three watermark methods with its corresponding subjective measures. The aim was to see if these measures could be used to estimate the subjective quality of audio with various watermarks. The subjective quality was measured with MUSHRA. Samples were watermarked with the direct spread-spectrum, the echo hiding, and the stereo watermarking method. The objective scores were calculated using three PEAQ implementations: PQevalAudio, EAQUAL, and peaqb. Additionally, PSMt was calculated using the PEASS package implementing the PEMO-Q, a new objective assessment method. All of the PEAQ implementations were shown to have low correlation with subjective quality, below 0.58, while PEMOQ showed high correlation, exceeding 0.75. Therefore, PEMO-Q seems to be the choice to assess the audio quality of watermarked audio, which can be used to screen conditions that satisfy the target subjective quality.