Semi-fragile watermarking for video quality evaluation in broadcast scenario

Nowadays the broadcasting of digital video contents is a common scenario. Evaluation of the quality of received information is an important issue for companies involved in this business. The goal is to obtain blind estimation of the quality - i.e. without information about the original video - like in the analog TV scenario. In this paper, we present a novel technique to perform this operation based on semi-fragile watermarking where the watermark is used as reference signal. The algorithm uses a watermarking technique in the transformed domain. A watermark is inserted in the original video. Then the video passes through different compression steps, it is transmitted and received. At the end of the distribution chain the video quality is estimate by using correlation between original watermark and received video. The algorithm is tested for typical digital television broadcast bit-rate. The results show that the proposed algorithm provides a good estimation for the video quality for MPEG compression in particular for digital TV bit-rates.