Search

A wavelet-based, scalable video coding system, foveation scalable video coding (FSVC, is described and discussed.

An embedded foveation image coding (EFIC) algorithm is proposed. The algorithm orders the encoded bitstream to optimize foveated visual quality at arbitrary bit rates.

A study was conducted on a novel error concealment method called best neighborhood matching (BNM) using a special kind of information redundancy-blockwise similarity within the image. The findings indicate that the proposed algorithm can use the information of not only neighboring pixels but also remote regions in the image. Further studies are recommended to develop fast searching algorithms and to generalize the BNM technique for color images, image sequences or other kinds of signals.

Tone mapping operators (TMOs) aim to compress high dynamic range (HDR) images to low dynamic range (LDR) ones so as to visualize HDR images on standard displays. Most existing TMOs were demonstrated on specific examples without being thoroughly evaluated using well-designed and subject-validated image quality assessment models. A recently proposed tone mapped image quality index (TMQI) made one of the first attempts on objective quality assessment of tone mapped images. Here, we propose a substantially different approach to design TMO. Instead of using any predefined systematic computational structure for tone mapping (such as analytic image transformations and/or explicit contrast/edge enhancement), we directly navigate in the space of all images, searching for the image that optimizes an improved TMQI. In particular, we first improve the two building blocks in TMQI—structural fidelity and statistical naturalness components—leading to a TMQI-II metric. We then propose an iterative algorithm that alternatively improves the structural fidelity and statistical naturalness of the resulting image. Numerical and subjective experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm consistently produces better quality tone mapped images even when the initial images of the iteration are created by the most competitive TMOs. Meanwhile, these results also validate the superiority of TMQI-II over TMQI.11

Partial preliminary results of this work were presented at ICASSP 2013 and ICME 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been a growing interest in image fusion technologies, but how to objectively evaluate the quality of fused images has not been fully understood. Here, we propose a method for objective quality assessment of multiexposure multifocus image fusion based on the evaluation of three key factors of fused image quality: 1) contrast preservation; 2) sharpness; and 3) structure preservation. Subjective experiments are conducted to create an image fusion database, based on which, performance evaluation shows that the proposed fusion quality index correlates well with subjective scores, and gives a significant improvement over the existing fusion quality measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reduced-reference image quality assessment (RR-IQA) provides a practical solution for automatic image quality evaluations in various applications where only partial information about the original reference image is accessible. In this paper, we propose an RR-IQA method by estimating the structural similarity index (SSIM), which is a widely used full-reference (FR) image quality measure shown to be a good indicator of perceptual image quality. Specifically, we extract statistical features from a multiscale multiorientation divisive normalization transform and develop a distortion measure by following the philosophy in the construction of SSIM. We find an interesting linear relationship between the FR SSIM measure and our RR estimate when the image distortion type is fixed. A regression-by-discretization method is then applied to normalize our measure across image distortion types. We use six publicly available subject-rated databases to test the proposed RR-SSIM method, which shows strong correlations with both SSIM and subjective quality evaluations. Finally, we introduce the novel idea of partially repairing an image using RR features and use deblurring as an example to demonstrate its application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of reconstruction of digital images from their blurred and noisy measurements is unarguably one of the central problems in imaging sciences. Despite its ill-posed nature, this problem can often be solved in a unique and stable manner, provided appropriate assumptions on the nature of the images to be recovered. In this paper, however, a more challenging setting is considered, in which accurate knowledge of the blurring operator is lacking, thereby transforming the reconstruction problem at hand into a problem of blind deconvolution. As a specific application, the current presentation focuses on reconstruction of short-exposure optical images measured through atmospheric turbulence. The latter is known to give rise to random aberrations in the optical wavefront, which are in turn translated into random variations of the point spread function of the optical system in use. A standard way to track such variations involves using adaptive optics. Thus, for example, the Shack–Hartmann interferometer provides measurements of the optical wavefront through sensing its partial derivatives. In such a case, the accuracy of wavefront reconstruction is proportional to the number of lenslets used by the interferometer and, hence, to its complexity. Accordingly, in this paper, we show how to minimize the above complexity through reducing the number of the lenslets while compensating for undersampling artifacts by means of derivative compressed sensing. Additionally, we provide empirical proof that the above simplification and its associated solution scheme result in image reconstructions, whose quality is comparable to the reconstructions obtained using conventional (dense) measurements of the optical wavefront. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We propose a simple but effective strategy that aims to enhance the performance of existing video denoising algorithms, i.e., polyview fusion (PVF). The idea is to denoise the noisy video as a 3-D volume using a given base 2-D denoising algorithm but applied from multiple views (front, top, and side views). A fusion algorithm is then designed to merge the resulting multiple denoised videos into one, so that the visual quality of the fused video is improved. Extensive tests using a variety of base video-denoising algorithms show that the proposed PVF method leads to surprisingly significant and consistent gain in terms of both peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM) performance, particularly at high noise levels, where the improvement over state-of-the-art denoising algorithms is often more than 2 dB in PSNR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its introduction in 2004, the structural similarity (SSIM) index has gained widespread popularity as a tool to assess the quality of images and to evaluate the performance of image processing algorithms and systems. There has been also a growing interest of using SSIM as an objective function in optimization problems in a variety of image processing applications. One major issue that could strongly impede the progress of such efforts is the lack of understanding of the mathematical properties of the SSIM measure. For example, some highly desirable properties such as convexity and triangular inequality that are possessed by the mean squared error may not hold. In this paper, we first construct a series of normalized and generalized (vector-valued) metrics based on the important ingredients of SSIM. We then show that such modified measures are valid distance metrics and have many useful properties, among which the most significant ones include quasi-convexity, a region of convexity around the minimizer, and distance preservation under orthogonal or unitary transformations. The groundwork laid here extends the potentials of SSIM in both theoretical development and practical applications. ref refid="fnote1"/ id="fnote1" asterisk="no"paraSome preliminary results of this paper (specifically, parts of refid="sec2"Section II ) were presented at International Conference on Image and Analysis and Recognition, Burnaby, BC, Canada, June 2011.para [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many state-of-the-art perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) algorithms share a common two-stage structure: local quality/distortion measurement followed by pooling. While significant progress has been made in measuring local image quality/distortion, the pooling stage is often done in ad-hoc ways, lacking theoretical principles and reliable computational models. This paper aims to test the hypothesis that when viewing natural images, the optimal perceptual weights for pooling should be proportional to local information content, which can be estimated in units of bit using advanced statistical models of natural images. Our extensive studies based upon six publicly-available subject-rated image databases concluded with three useful findings. First, information content weighting leads to consistent improvement in the performance of IQA algorithms. Second, surprisingly, with information content weighting, even the widely criticized peak signal-to-noise-ratio can be converted to a competitive perceptual quality measure when compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. Third, the best overall performance is achieved by combining information content weighting with multiscale structural similarity measures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We introduce a new measure of image similarity called the complex wavelet structural similarity (CW-SSIM) index and show its applicability as a general purpose image similarity index. The key idea behind CW-SSIM is that certain image distortions lead to consistent phase changes in the local wavelet coefficients, and that a consistent phase shift of the coefficients does not change the structural content of the image. By conducting four case studies, we have demonstrated the superiority of the CW-SSIM index against other indices (e.g., Dice, Hausdorff distance) commonly used for assessing the similarity of a given pair of images. In addition, we show that the CW-SSIM index has a number of advantages. It is robust to small rotations and translations. It provides useful comparisons even without a preprocessing image registration step, which is essential for other indices. Moreover, it is computationally less expensive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective methods for assessing perceptual image quality traditionally attempted to quantify the visibility of errors (differences) between a distorted image and a reference image using a variety of known properties of the human visual system. Under the assumption that human visual perception is highly adapted for extracting structural information from a scene, we introduce an alternative complementary framework for quality assessment based on the degradation of structural information. As a specific example of this concept, we develop a Structural Similarity Index and demonstrate its promise through a set of intuitive examples, as well as comparison to both subjective ratings and state-of-the-art objective methods on a database of images compressed with JPEG and JPEG2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]