A Review of Recent Patents for Quality Assessment of Multimedia Communications by Digital Watermarking

Multimedia communications has gained an increasing interest in the last decade. The design of services and distributed multimedia applications imposes a number of Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In particular, the processing and delivery of multimedia content are not independent and their interaction has a major impact on the QoS aspects. Recently, tracing watermarking has been proposed as a technique to provide a blind measure of the QoS of the communication, focusing on multimedia communication scenarios. This paper aims at presenting a review of recent patents, and state of art solutions as well, in the field of QoS assessment of multimedia communications by tracing watermarking. Finally, a discussion pointing out the current and future developments in this area summarizes the remarkable points of this work.