A blind quality assessment of video using fragile watermarking

The measurement of the performance of a transmission system involves quality assessment and is an important requirement of many modern multimedia communication systems. Obtaining the original input may be both difficult as well as costly, and therefore, blind quality assessment becomes an obvious choice. In the absence of a reference image, embedding an external watermark and observing its degradation provided a solution but involved extra cost. The proposed approach overcomes this difficulty by relying on the extraction of robust features from the video frames to construct the watermark. This watermark is then embedded into the video frames as a fragile one, which is degraded along with the degradation undergone by the transmitted video frames. The extracted fragile watermark, from the received frames is compared with the reference watermark, constructed from the robust features of the corresponding received frames to assess the amount of degradation.