Automatic objective picture quality measurement method using invisible marker signals as Reduced References

摘要

To automate the operation and monitoring of digital video transmissions, the authors propose an objective picture quality measurement method for coded pictures that uses embedded invisible marker signals and does not require reference pictures. The authors previously proposed a method for estimating PSNR by using the rate of false detection of binary information expressed by the marker signals. This paper proposes another method for estimating PSNR. This method is based on direct measurement of the magnitude of the marker signal degradation instead of the false detection rate of the embedded information. Since the theoretical model shows that the PSNR of the decoded pictures can be approximately calculated by measuring the degradation of only one amplitude component of the spread spectrum, the marker is embedded into the amplitude component of the spread spectrum domain and is detected from the decoded pictures to calculate the degradation. The proposed method can be applied to various types of video transmissions because this method is valid regardless of the kind of pictures, bitrates, or number of tandem codec connection stages. Furthermore, the proposed method is also applicable to high quality video transmissions because the degradation caused by embedding markers is negligibly small.