<title>Objective measurement scheme for perceived picture quality degradation caused by MPEG encoding without any reference pictures</title>

Abstract

The rapid progress in digital transmission technology has spurred demand for developing a technology that supports monitoring of video transmissions. Automating the picture quality assessment process is in particular demand because it currently depends on subjective assessments by human operators and places a heavy burden on them. The authors therefore propose an objective picture quality measurement method that works without reference pictures. In this proposed method, invisible markers are embedded into original pictures by use of the spread spectrum data hiding method. Since the markers are widely spread over the frequency domain, the degradation caused by MPEG compression can be estimated by detecting the extent of marker degradation. Our method is usable regardless of the kind of picture, bitrate, and number of stages of tandem codec connections. The degradation in picture quality caused by the embedded markers is quite small and not perceivable by the human eye. The proposed method is therefore applicable to a wide range of visual transmission services.