Picture quality evaluation strategy using a watermarking technique

Measuring image quality is crucial for image processing operations, such as acquisition, compression, restoration, enhancement, and reproduction. In this paper, a "no-reference" picture quality evaluation method that uses watermarking as a tool for evaluating quality is proposed. A known watermark is embedded in an image, and then image fidelity measurement is computed between original and extracted watermarks in order to evaluate quality differences between the original image and the degraded one. This method can use any full-reference measurements because it can use two different watermarks. Experimental results show the efficiency of the given approach in the case of JPEG compression.