Abstract:

In order to improve the precision and the watermarking invisibility of the reduced-reference image quality assessment method,a new image quality assessment method based on digital watermarking in wavelet domain is propsed.In this method,first,the texture-rich region of the original image is detected according to the characteristics of human visual system,and a watermark-embedded map is obtained.Next,a 3-level wavelet decomposition of the original image is performed.Then,a self-defined digital watermark is embedded in each wavelet coefficient block according to the watermark-embedded map,and the adaptive adjustments of quantization parameter are adopted to ensure the invisibility of watermark.Finally,the image quality is objectively assessed according to the watermark-recovering rate of the distortion image.Experimental results indicate that,as compared with the conventional image quality assessment method based on PSNR and with the reduced-reference image quality assessment（RRIQA） method,the precision,monotonicity and consistency of the proposed method are respectively 8.5% and 4.4%,5.4% and 2.2%,5.7% and 3.4% higher.

Key words: image quality assessment, reduced-reference, digital watermarking, just noticeable difference, human visual system