Reduced reference watermark-based image transmission quality metric

A novel reduced reference (RR) method of channel estimation for image transmission through lossy channels is presented. Estimation is based on the amount of distortion the low frequency content of the image or its histogram suffers during transmission. This distortion is computed by sending the low frequency content of the original image or the corresponding histogram to the receiver by means of a robust watermark. Simulations for different types of images and different channel losses yield large amounts of correlation between the estimated mean square error (MSE) and the structural similarity (SSIM) index.