Reduced-reference stereoscopic image quality assessment based on view and disparity zero-watermarks

As a practical and novel application of watermarking, this paper presents a zero-watermarking based objective reduced-reference stereoscopic image quality assessment (RR-SIQA) method. In the proposed method, two kinds of zero-watermarks are constructed according to the characteristics of image structure and stereoscopic perception. Concretely, two view zero-watermarks, which are constructed by judging the relation of the horizontal and vertical components of gradient vectors with respect to the two views, are used to reflect the image structure variation of the stereoscopic image. Meanwhile, a disparity zero-watermark, which is constructed with disparity map of the stereoscopic image, is used to reflect the stereoscopic perception quality variation. Then, the quality of stereoscopic image is objectively assessed by pooling the recovering rates of the detected zero-watermarks. The experimental results show that the stereoscopic image quality evaluation results assessed with the proposed RR-SIQA method are well consistent with subjective assessment, and the proposed method achieves better performance than the widely used full-reference stereoscopic image quality assessment method PSNR in assessing quality of stereoscopic images compressed with JPEG and JPEG2000.