Quality Estimation of Video Transmitted overan Additive WGN Channel based on Digital Watermarking and Wavelet Transform

This paper presents an evaluation for a wavelet-based digital watermarking technique used in estimating the quality of video sequences transmitted over Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel in terms of a classical objective metric, such as Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) without the need of the original video. In this method, a watermark is embedded into the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) domain of the original video frames using a quantization method. The degradation of the extracted watermark can be used to estimate the video quality in terms of PSNR with good accuracy. We calculated PSNR for video frames contaminated with AWGN and compared the values with those estimated using the Watermarking-DWT based approach. It is found that the calculated and estimated quality measures of the video frames are highly correlated, suggesting that this method can provide a good quality measure for video frames transmitted over AWGN channel without the need of the original video.




References:
[1] G. De Haan, Video Processing for Multimedia Systems. Eindhoven, The
Netherlands: Univ. Press Eindhoven, 2003.
[2] Vladimir Zlokolica, Aleksandra Pizurica, and Wilfried Philips, "Noise
Estimation for Video Processing Based on Spatio-Temporal Gradients"
IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Vol. 13, No. 6, June 2006.
[3] B.Furht and O. Marqure, The Handbook of Video Databases: Design
and Applications, CRC Press, pp. 1041-1078, September 2003.
[4] S. Wang, D. Zheng, J Zhao, W. J. Tam, and F. Speranza, "An Image
quality evaluation method based on digital watermarking," IEEE Trans.
Circuits Syst. Video Technol., vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 98-105, Jan. 2007.
[5] M. C. Q. Farias, M. Carli, and S. K. Mitra, "Objective video quality
metric based on data hiding," IEEE Trans. Consum. Electron., vol. 51,
no. 3, pp. 983-992, Aug. 2005.
[6] S.Wang, J. Zhao, W. J. Tam, and F. Speranza, "Image quality
measurement by using digital watermarking based on discrete wavelet
transform," in Proc. 22nd Biennial Symp. Commun., Kingston, ON,
Canada, pp. 210-212, Jun. 2004,
[7] D. Zheng, J. Zhao, W. J. Tam, and F. Speranza, "Image quality
measurement by using digital watermarking," in Proc. IEEE Int.
Workshop Haptic, Audio, Vis. Environ. Applicat., Ottawa, ON, Canada,
pp. 65-70, Sep. 2003.
[8] P. Campisi, M. Carli, G. Giunta, and A. Neri, "Blind quality assessment
system for multimedia communications using tracing watermarking,"
IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 996-1002, Apr. 2003.
[9] S. Wang, D. Zheng, J. Zhao, W. J. Tam, and F. Speranza, "An accurate
method for image quality evaluation using digital watermarking," IEICE
Electron. Exp. (ELEX), vol. 2, no. 20, pp. 523-529, Oct. 2005.
[10] D. Kundur and D. Hatzinakos, "Digital watermarking for telltale tamper
proofing and authentication," Proc. IEEE, vol. 87, no. 7, pp. 1167-1180,
Jul. 1999.
[11] P. W. Chan, M. R. Lyu, and R. T. Chin, "A novel scheme for hybrid
digital video watermarking: approach, evaluation and experimentation,"
IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol., vol. 15, no. 12, pp. 1638-
1649, Dec. 2005.
[12] R. Tu and J. Zhao, "A novel semi-fragile audio watermarking scheme,"
in Proc. IEEE Int. Workshop Haptic, Audio Vis. Environ. Applicat.,
Ottawa, ON, Canada, pp. 89-94, Sep. 2003.
[13] I. Cox, M. Miller, and J. Bloom, Digital Watermarking. New York:
Morgan Kaufmann, 2002.