Reduced reference stereoscopic image quality assessment using digital watermarking

•A novel RR-SIQA algorithm based on digital watermarking technique is proposed.•Dither modulation (DM) watermarking method is used.•The proposed algorithm avoids the necessity of an ancillary channel in the deployment of RR-SIQA.•Good consistency with subjective quality scores.

In this paper, a novel reduced-reference stereoscopic image quality assessment (RR-SIQA) algorithm is proposed by means of an unconventional use of watermarking technique. Watermarking techniques are usually employed for authenticity verification and copyright protection. Here, watermarking technique is adopted to provide a new approach for RR-SIQA. Firstly, the features of image are extracted in reorganized discrete cosine transform domain, and then embedded into the stereoscopic image as invisible hidden information. In order to improve the reliability of the watermarking, some channel coding techniques are applied before the process of embedding watermark. At the receiver, the watermark can be decoded and used to measure the quality of the distorted stereoscopic image. The proposed algorithm overcomes the limitations of other existing methods that require an auxiliary channel. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed algorithm has a good consistency with subjective quality scores, and can reflect the visual perception of stereoscopic image effectively.