Statistical Analysis of Watermarking Transparency through Image Quality Metrics

In this paper, we propose a new statistical approach to investigate the performance of some objective quality metrics used in the literature in order to determine the most suitable quality metric for watermark transparency evaluation. To this end, we have defined a new procedure based on the ANOVA (ANalysis Of VAriance) tests and the subjective performance evaluation. Firstly, a set of selected quality metrics is statistically analyzed by means of ANOVA (ANalysis Of VAriance) technique to identify the specific metric that provides the best discrimination to watermarking artifacts. So, the obtained results will answer the question: “which metrics are sensitive to watermarking artifacts?” Secondly, subjective tests were performed and some correlation measures between MOS (Mean Opinion Score) and each quality metric are computed. It is clear that the best quality metric is the one that provides the best consistency with subjective experiments. Results from both objective and subjective investigation were discussed to obtain some concluding remarks. All conclusions drawn in the paper are supported by extensive experiments in terms of used quality metrics, watermarking algorithms and image database.