TDW3431 Digital Watermarking Trimester 1, 2014/2015

Tutorial 5
(Lecture 5)

1. Discuss the difference between fidelity and quality.

 Fidelity is a measure of the similarity between signals before and after processing. A high-
fidelity reproduction is a reproduction that is very similar to the original; a low-fidelity
reproduction is dissimilar, or distinguishable, from the original.

 Quality is an absolute measure of appeal. A high-quality image or high-quality audio clip

simply looks, or sounds good. That is, it has no obvious processing artifacts.

2. Discuss the reason why studies involving human evaluation should use a large number of subjects,
and perform a large number of trials.

 In studies that involve the judgment of human beings, it is important to recognize that visual
and auditory sensitivities can vary significantly from individual to individual, and these
sensitivities also change over time in any one individual.

 Perhaps the most important point to note here is that the experiments are statistical in nature.
Different observers will behave differently. One observer might claim to see a difference in a
pair of images, whereas another observer may not.

 Sometimes these discrepancies are random. Other times, the discrepancies reflect the very
different perceptual abilities of observers; in fact, it is well known that a small percentage of
people have extremely acute vision or hearing, i.e., golden eyes and golden ears.

 Therefore, it is common that studies involving human evaluation use a large number of
subjects, and perform a large number of trials. The results of a study may be specific to the
population from which the subjects are drawn, e.g., young adults, ages 18 to 25.

3. A classical experimental paradigm for measuring perceptual phenomena is the two alternatives,
forced choice (2AFC). Describe this paradigm with an appropriate example.

 A classical experiment paradigm for measuring perceptual phenomena is two alternatives,

forced choice (2AFC). In this procedure, observers are asked to give one of two
alternatives responses to each of several trial stimuli.

 For example, to test the quality impact of a watermarking algorithm, each trial of the
experiment might present the observer with two versions of one work: one version of the
work would be the original; the other would be watermarked.

 The observer, unaware of the differences between the works, must decide which one has
higher quality.

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TDW3431 Digital Watermarking Trimester 1, 2014/2015

 In the case where no difference in quality can be perceived, the responses are expected to be
random. Random choices suggest that observers are unable to identify one selection as being
consistently better quality than the other.

 Thus, 50% correct answers correspond to zero JND, while 75% correct correspond to one
JND.

4. Describe the TWO drawbacks of human evaluation measurement techniques.

 Human evaluation measurement techniques can be very expensive, as a number of golden

ears and golden eyes will have to be employed at the quality control points in the production
process. In addition to that, the experiments should be conducted for more than once.

 They are not easily repeated, due to the reason that the human visual and auditory sensitivities
can vary different from individual to individual, and from time to time.

5. Give the TWO advantages of the automated evaluation techniques with an appropriate example.

 Automated evaluation techniques are faster, and cheaper to implement.

 Assuming the use of a deterministic model, the evaluation is repeatable, so that different
watermarking methods can be directly compared.

 One of the simplest automated evaluation techniques is the Mean Square Error (MSE)
function that gives a measure of the perceptual distance between an original work, C0, and a
watermarked work, Cw:

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TDW3431 Digital Watermarking Trimester 1, 2014/2015

6. In experiments designed to measure frequency sensitivity, observers are presented with isolated
stimuli and their perception of these stimuli is tested. Figure 1 shows the spectral sensitivity for
three different color systems, i.e., R- Red, G - Green and B - Blue, in the normal human color
vision. Draw a conclusion based on the figure and suggest a way of embedding watermark signals
in RGB images.

Figure 1: The three color systems in normal human color vision.

 In accordance with Figure 1, the relative (spectral) sensitivity of the blue channel is shown to
be significantly lower than the other two channels.

 This implies that distortions applied to the blue channel can be unnoticeable from human
observation.

 For this reason, several color watermarking systems place a large proportion of the watermark
signals in the blue channel of the RGB images.

7. Differentiate frequency masking from brightness masking.

 Frequency Masking - The presence of one frequency masks the perception of another.

 Brightness Masking - The local brightness masks contrast changes.