Quality-Aware Images
A quality-aware image is created by extracting certain
features of the original (high-quality) image and embedding them into the image
as invisible hidden messages. Such an image can be aware of its own quality degradation because when a distorted
version of the image is received, users can decode the hidden messages and use
them to provide an objective measure of the quality of the distorted image. The
advantages of this approach include:
1) It makes the image quality assessment task easier than
no-reference methods (referring to those methods that do not use any information
about the original image).
2) It makes the image quality assessment task feasible as
compared to full-reference methods (referring to those methods that require
full access to the original image). Here we have assumed that the users do not
have any other access to the original image.
3) It does not affect the conventional usage of the image
data because the data embedding process causes only invisible changes to the
image.
4) It allows the image data to be stored, converted and
distributed using any existing or user-defined formats without losing the
functionality of “quality-awareness”, provided the hidden messages are not
corrupted during lossy format conversion. Note that
this is an advantage over the idea of adding image features into the image
header, which may be lost during format conversion.
5) It provides the users with a chance to partially “repair”
the received distorted image by making use of the embedded features.
The concept of quality-aware image was first introduced in
Z. Wang, Guixing
Wu, Hamid
R. Sheikh, E. P. Simoncelli, En-Hui Yang and Alan C. Bovik,
"Quality-Aware
images," IEEE Transactions on Image Processing,
vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 1680-1689, June 2006.
Here we provide an implementation published in the above
paper. The implementation employs 1) a reduced-reference image quality
assessment algorithm based on a statistical model of natural images, and 2) a
quantization watermarking-based data hiding technique in the wavelet transform
domain. You can download the software for free, change it as you like and use
it anywhere, but please refer to its original source.
Download
Software (qaware_codec.zip, 1.38M)
Created
Last updated