QUALITY OF SERVICE ASSESSMENT FOR MPEG-2/4 VIDEOS IN MULTIMEDIA MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS USING DIGITAL WATERMARKING

摘要

In this paper, the estimation of the quality of a multimedia communication link is performed by means of an unconventional use of digital watermarking. Specifically, a known watermark is hidden into an MPEG-like video stream using an embedding method based on look-up table in the spatial domain. Since both the embedded watermark and the host data follow the same communication link, the alterations endured by the watermark are likely to also be suffered by the entire data. Therefore, the estimation of the received watermark allows dynamically evaluating the effective quality of the provided video services. The proposed method has been tailored to wireless multimedia communication systems and applied to MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 coded video sequences. The quality assessment is based on the evaluation of the mean-square-error between the estimated and the real watermark. The obtained results show the feasibility of the proposed method.