1,627 research outputs found
Spread spectrum-based video watermarking algorithms for copyright protection
Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/2263 on 14.03.2017 by CS (TIS)Digital technologies know an unprecedented expansion in the last years. The consumer can
now benefit from hardware and software which was considered state-of-the-art several years
ago. The advantages offered by the digital technologies are major but the same digital
technology opens the door for unlimited piracy. Copying an analogue VCR tape was certainly
possible and relatively easy, in spite of various forms of protection, but due to the analogue
environment, the subsequent copies had an inherent loss in quality. This was a natural way of
limiting the multiple copying of a video material. With digital technology, this barrier
disappears, being possible to make as many copies as desired, without any loss in quality
whatsoever. Digital watermarking is one of the best available tools for fighting this threat.
The aim of the present work was to develop a digital watermarking system compliant with the
recommendations drawn by the EBU, for video broadcast monitoring. Since the watermark
can be inserted in either spatial domain or transform domain, this aspect was investigated and
led to the conclusion that wavelet transform is one of the best solutions available. Since
watermarking is not an easy task, especially considering the robustness under various attacks
several techniques were employed in order to increase the capacity/robustness of the system:
spread-spectrum and modulation techniques to cast the watermark, powerful error correction
to protect the mark, human visual models to insert a robust mark and to ensure its invisibility.
The combination of these methods led to a major improvement, but yet the system wasn't
robust to several important geometrical attacks. In order to achieve this last milestone, the
system uses two distinct watermarks: a spatial domain reference watermark and the main
watermark embedded in the wavelet domain. By using this reference watermark and techniques
specific to image registration, the system is able to determine the parameters of the attack and
revert it. Once the attack was reverted, the main watermark is recovered. The final result is a
high capacity, blind DWr-based video watermarking system, robust to a wide range of attacks.BBC Research & Developmen
Sparse representation based stereoscopic image quality assessment accounting for perceptual cognitive process
In this paper, we propose a sparse representation based Reduced-Reference Image Quality Assessment (RR-IQA) index for stereoscopic images from the following two perspectives: 1) Human visual system (HVS) always tries to infer the meaningful information and reduces uncertainty from the visual stimuli, and the entropy of primitive (EoP) can well describe this visual cognitive progress when perceiving natural images. 2) Ocular dominance (also known as binocularity) which represents the interaction between two eyes is quantified by the sparse representation coefficients. Inspired by previous research, the perception and understanding of an image is considered as an active inference process determined by the level of “surprise”, which can be described by EoP. Therefore, the primitives learnt from natural images can be utilized to evaluate the visual information by computing entropy. Meanwhile, considering the binocularity in stereo image quality assessment, a feasible way is proposed to characterize this binocular process according to the sparse representation coefficients of each view. Experimental results on LIVE 3D image databases and MCL database further demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves high consistency with subjective evaluation
A Detail Based Method for Linear Full Reference Image Quality Prediction
In this paper, a novel Full Reference method is proposed for image quality
assessment, using the combination of two separate metrics to measure the
perceptually distinct impact of detail losses and of spurious details. To this
purpose, the gradient of the impaired image is locally decomposed as a
predicted version of the original gradient, plus a gradient residual. It is
assumed that the detail attenuation identifies the detail loss, whereas the
gradient residuals describe the spurious details. It turns out that the
perceptual impact of detail losses is roughly linear with the loss of the
positional Fisher information, while the perceptual impact of the spurious
details is roughly proportional to a logarithmic measure of the signal to
residual ratio. The affine combination of these two metrics forms a new index
strongly correlated with the empirical Differential Mean Opinion Score (DMOS)
for a significant class of image impairments, as verified for three independent
popular databases. The method allowed alignment and merging of DMOS data coming
from these different databases to a common DMOS scale by affine
transformations. Unexpectedly, the DMOS scale setting is possible by the
analysis of a single image affected by additive noise.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures. Copyright notice: The paper has been accepted
for publication on the IEEE Trans. on Image Processing on 19/09/2017 and the
copyright has been transferred to the IEE
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