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.