Video quality evaluation using DWT-SPIHT based watermarking technique

Abstract

The video quality analysis is very important in today's video broadcasting and transmission quality control because the quality is a key factor in customer satisfaction. This paper presents a full reference based video quality evaluation technique, using the application of watermarking. Frames with low complexity value are selected for the insertion of the watermark, on the selected video frames; DWT is applied up to third level to get the DWT coefficients. Then SPIHT encoding/decoding is applied which helps in finding the significant coefficients for the insertion of watermark. The significant coefficients are converted into bit-planes and 3rd bit plane (from LSB side) of each coefficient is selected for watermark. The SPIHT algorithm ensures that the watermark bits are inserted uniformly throughout the frames. After embedding the watermark, the IDWT is applied and we get the watermarked frames which are then incorporated in the video file. The simulation results show no visible difference between watermarked frame and original frame. The video quality is estimated in terms of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structure similarity (SSIM) and true detection rates (TDR) against various attacks like Salt pepper noise, rotation Gaussian noise and compression attacks. The results indicate that the proposed technique for quality evaluation of the video, accurately calculates the quality of a video and also it is robust against various attacks.