CSV: Image quality assessment based on color,structure, and visual system

This paper presents a full-reference image quality estimator based on color, structure, and visual system characteristics denoted as CSV. In contrast to the majority of existing methods, we quantify perceptual color degradations rather than absolute pixel-wise changes. We use the CIEDE2000, color difference formulation to quantify low-level color degradations and the Earth Mover's Distance between color name probability vectors to measure significant color degradations. In addition to the perceptual color difference, CSV also contains structural and perceptual differences. Structural feature maps are obtained by mean subtraction and divisive normalization, and perceptual feature maps are obtained from contrast sensitivity formulations of retinal ganglion cells. The proposed quality estimator CSV is tested on the LIVE, the Multiply Distorted LIVE, and the TID 2013 databases, and it is always among the top two performing quality estimators in terms of at least ranking, monotonic behavior or linearity.     

A vision-based masking model for spread-spectrum image watermarking

We present a perceptual model for hiding a spread-spectrum watermark of variable amplitude and density in an image. The model takes into account the sensitivity and masking behavior of the human visual system by means of a local isotropic contrast measure and a masking model. We compare the insertion of this watermark in luminance images and in the blue channel of color images. We also evaluate the robustness of such a watermark with respect to its embedding density. Our results show that this approach facilitates the insertion of a more robust watermark while preserving the visual quality of the original. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the maximum watermark density generally does not provide the best detection performance.     

基于局部自适应色差阈值的彩色图像边缘检测

为了使彩色图像的边缘检测器更符合人眼对图像信息的分辨情况,防止视觉不敏感区域的边缘的过检测问题,该文提出一种自适应色差阈值的估计方法并与不同的色彩梯度算子结合应用于彩色图像的边缘检测中。构建包括亮度掩模与对比灵敏度的局部色差可视阈值的权重因子,结合局部背景亮度以及亮度与色彩的空间频率对人眼视觉的影响。利用信噪比(SNR), Pratt因子与时间复杂度对提出的算法的抗噪性与边缘定位的准确性以及时间代价进行定量评价,表明该算法能准确检测出图像边缘且有效地抵抗噪声对图像的干扰。     

Image information and visual quality.

Measurement of visual quality is of fundamental importance to numerous image and video processing applications. The goal of quality assessment (QA) research is to design algorithms that can automatically assess the quality of images or videos in a perceptually consistent manner. Image QA algorithms generally interpret image quality as fidelity or similarity with a "reference" or "perfect" image in some perceptual space. Such "full-reference" QA methods attempt to achieve consistency in quality prediction by modeling salient physiological and psychovisual features of the human visual system (HVS), or by signal fidelity measures. In this paper, we approach the image QA problem as an information fidelity problem. Specifically, we propose to quantify the loss of image information to the distortion process and explore the relationship between image information and visual quality. QA systems are invariably involved with judging the visual quality of "natural" images and videos that are meant for "human consumption." Researchers have developed sophisticated models to capture the statistics of such natural signals. Using these models, we previously presented an information fidelity criterion for image QA that related image quality with the amount of information shared between a reference and a distorted image. In this paper, we propose an image information measure that quantifies the information that is present in the reference image and how much of this reference information can be extracted from the distorted image. Combining these two quantities, we propose a visual information fidelity measure for image QA. We validate the performance of our algorithm with an extensive subjective study involving 779 images and show that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art image QA algorithms by a sizeable margin in our simulations. The code and the data from the subjective study are available at the LIVE website.     

Image quality assessment using a SVD-based structural projection

The development of objective image quality assessment (IQA) metrics aligned with human perception is of fundamental importance to numerous image-processing applications. Recently, human visual system (HVS)-based engineering algorithms have received widespread attention for their low computational complexity and good performance. In this paper, we propose a new IQA model by incorporating these available engineering principles. A local singular value decomposition (SVD) is first utilised as a structural projection tool to select local image distortion features, and then, both perceptual spatial pooling and neural networks (NN) are employed to combine feature vectors to predict a single perceptual quality score. Extensive experiments and cross-validations conducted with three publicly available IQA databases demonstrate the accuracy, consistency, robustness, and stability of the proposed approach compared to state-of-the-art IQA methods, such as Visual Information Fidelity (VIF), Visual Signal to Noise Ratio (VSNR), and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM).     

Content adaptive video denoising based on human visual perception

In this paper, we propose content adaptive denoising in highly corrupted videos based on human visual perception. We introduce the human visual perception in video denoising to achieve good performance. In general, smooth regions corrupted by noise are much more annoying to human observers than complex regions. Moreover, human eyes are more interested in complex regions with image details and more sensitive to luminance than chrominance. Based on the human visual perception, we perform perceptual video denoising to effectively preserve image details and remove annoying noise. To successfully remove noise and recover the image details, we extend nonlocal mean filtering to the spatiotemporal domain. With the guidance of content adaptive segmentation and motion detection, we conduct content adaptive filtering in the YUV color space to consider context in images and obtain perceptually pleasant results. Extensive experiments on various video sequences demonstrate that the proposed method reconstructs natural-looking results even in highly corrupted images and achieves good performance in terms of both visual quality and quantitative measures.     

Color image denoising with wavelet thresholding based on human visual system model

Recent research in transform-based image denoising has focused on the wavelet transform due to its superior performance over other transform. Performance is often measured solely in terms of PSNR and denoising algorithms are optimized for this quantitative metric. The performance in terms of subjective quality is typically not evaluated. Moreover, human visual system (HVS) is often not incorporated into denoising algorithm. This paper presents a new approach to color image denoising taking into consideration HVS model. The denoising process takes place in the wavelet transform domain. A Contrast Sensitivity Function (CSF) implementation is employed in the subband of wavelet domain based on an invariant single factor weighting and noise masking is adopted in succession. Significant improvement is reported in the experimental results in terms of perceptual error metrics and visual effect.     

Postprocessing of images by filtering the unmasked coding noise

This paper presents a methodology for the restoration of the visual quality of still images affected by coding noise. This quality restoration is achieved only by considering the additive coding noise and is therefore limited to an adaptive postprocessing filtering. It is based on a model of the human visual system that considers the relationship between visual stimuli and their visibility. This phenomenon known as masking is used as a criterion for the locally adaptive filtering design. An image transformation that yields visual stimuli tuned to the frequency and orientation according to the perceptual model is proposed. It allows a local measure of the masking of each perceptual stimulus considering the contrast between signal and estimated noise. This measure is obtained by analytic filtering. Processing schemes are presented with applications to the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and subband coded images. One proposed solution considers the characteristics of DCT coding noise for the estimation of the noise. Another solution is based on a "blind" neural estimation of the noise characteristics. Experimental results of the proposed approaches show significant improvements of the visual quality, which validates our perceptual model and filtering.     

New visual perceptual pooling strategy for image quality assessment

Most of Image Quality Assessment (IQA) metrics consist of two processes. In the first process, quality map of image is measured locally. In the second process, the last quality score is converted from the quality map by using the pooling strategy. The first process had been made effective and significant progresses, while the second process was always done in simple ways. In the second process of the pooling strategy, the optimal perceptual pooling weights should be determined and computed according to Human Visual System (HVS). Thus, a reliable spatial pooling mathematical model based on HVS is an important issue worthy of study. In this paper, a new Visual Perceptual Pooling Strategy (VPPS) for IQA is presented based on contrast sensitivity and luminance sensitivity of HVS. Experimental results with the LIVE database show that the visual perceptual weights, obtained by the proposed pooling strategy, can effectively and significantly improve the performances of the IQA metrics with Mean Structural SIMilarity (MSSIM) or Phase Quantization Code (PQC). It is confirmed that the proposed VPPS demonstrates promising results for improving the performances of existing IQA metrics.     

Locally adaptive perceptual image coding

Most existing efforts in image and video compression have focused on developing methods to minimize not perceptual but rather mathematically tractable, easy to measure, distortion metrics. While nonperceptual distortion measures were found to be reasonably reliable for higher bit rates (high-quality applications), they do not correlate well with the perceived quality at lower bit rates and they fail to guarantee preservation of important perceptual qualities in the reconstructed images despite the potential for a good signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This paper presents a perceptual-based image coder, which discriminates between image components based on their perceptual relevance for achieving increased performance in terms of quality and bit rate. The new coder is based on a locally adaptive perceptual quantization scheme for compressing the visual data. Our strategy is to exploit human visual masking properties by deriving visual masking thresholds in a locally adaptive fashion based on a subband decomposition. The derived masking thresholds are used in controlling the quantization stage by adapting the quantizer reconstruction levels to the local amount of masking present at the level of each subband transform coefficient. Compared to the existing non-locally adaptive perceptual quantization methods, the new locally adaptive algorithm exhibits superior performance and does not require additional side information. This is accomplished by estimating the amount of available masking from the already quantized data and linear prediction of the coefficient under consideration. By virtue of the local adaptation, the proposed quantization scheme is able to remove a large amount of perceptually redundant information. Since the algorithm does not require additional side information, it yields a low entropy representation of the image and is well suited for perceptually lossless image compression.     

Noise-induced contrast enhancement using stochastic resonance on singular values

In this paper, a dynamic stochastic resonance (DSR)-based technique in singular value domain for contrast enhancement of dark images has been presented. The internal noise due to the lack of illumination is utilized using a DSR iterative process to obtain enhancement in contrast, colorfulness as well as perceptual quality. DSR is a phenomenon that has been strategically induced and exploited and has been found to give remarkable response when applied on the singular values of a dark low-contrast image. When an image is represented as a summation of image layers comprising of eigen vectors and values, the singular values denote luminance information of each such image layer. By application of DSR on the singular values using the analogy of a bistable double-well potential model, each of the singular values is scaled to produce an image with enhanced contrast as well as visual quality. When compared with performance of some existing spatial domain enhancement techniques, the proposed DSR-SVD technique is found to give noteworthy better performance in terms of contrast enhancement factor, color enhancement factor and perceptual quality measure.     

Image quality assessment by visual gradient similarity

A full-reference image quality assessment (IQA) model by multiscale visual gradient similarity (VGS) is presented. The VGS model adopts a three-stage approach: First, global contrast registration for each scale is applied. Then, pointwise comparison is given by multiplying the similarity of gradient direction with the similarity of gradient magnitude. Third, intrascale pooling is applied, followed by interscale pooling. Several properties of human visual systems on image gradient have been explored and incorporated into the VGS model. It has been found that Stevens' power law is also suitable for gradient magnitude. Other factors such as quality uniformity, visual detection threshold of gradient, and visual frequency sensitivity also affect subjective image quality. The optimal values of two parameters of VGS are trained with existing IQA databases, and good performance of VGS has been verified by cross validation. Experimental results show that VGS is competitive with state-of-the-art metrics in terms of prediction precision, reliability, simplicity, and low computational cost.     

Perceptual image quality assessment based on structural similarity and visual masking

We propose an improved objective image quality assessment method based on the structural similarity and visual masking, called the Perceptual Image Quality Assessment (PIQA). The PIQA contains three similarity measures: the luminance comparison measure, the structure comparison measure, the contrast comparison measure as same as the Structure Similarity (SSIM) and its variants. Firstly, in order to improve the ability of distinguishing the structure information in blurred images and noisy images, we modify the structure comparison measure by using the improved structure tensor which is more efficient for describing the structure information in global areas. Secondly, based on the perceptual characters of Human Visual System (HVS) perceptual process, the contrast masking and neighborhood masking are integrated to the contrast comparison measure. Finally, three measures are pooled together to compute the PIQA metric. Comparing with the state-of-the-art methods including Multi-scale SSIM (MS-SSIM), Visual Signal to Noise Ratio (VSNR) and Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) criterion, simulation results show that our approach is highly consistent with HVS perceptual process, and also delivers better performance.     

Wavelet-based color image compression: exploiting the contrast sensitivity function

The visual efficiency of an image compression technique depends directly on the amount of visually significant information it retains. By "visually significant" we mean information to which a human observer is most sensitive. The overall sensitivity depends on aspects such as contrast, color, spatial frequency, and so forth. One important aspect is the inverse relationship between contrast sensitivity and spatial frequency. This is described by the contrast sensitivity function (CSF). In compression algorithms the CSF can be exploited to regulate the quantization step-size to minimize the visibility of compression artifacts. Existing CSF implementations for wavelet-based image compression use the same quantization step-size for a large range of spatial frequencies. This is a coarse approximation of the CSF. This paper presents two new techniques that implement the CSF at significantly higher precision, adapting even to local variations of the spatial frequencies within a decomposition subband. The approaches can be used for luminance as well as color images. For color perception three different CSFs describe the sensitivity. The implementation technique is the same for each color band. Implemented into the JPEG2000 compression standard, the new techniques are compared to conventional CSF-schemes. The proposed techniques turn out to be visually more efficient than previously published methods. However, the emphasis of this paper is on how the CSF can be implemented in a precise and locally adaptive way, and not on the superior performance of these techniques.     

视觉对比度机制小目标增强与背景抑制综述北大核心CSCD

复杂背景中的红外弱小目标因亮度低、尺寸小、可用特征少而难以检测。如何在检测中抑制背景杂波、提高目标信噪比成为该领域的研究热点与难点。本文对基于人类视觉系统对比度机制的小目标增强与背景抑制技术的演进和性能进行了归纳与分析。局部对比度测度窗口由单尺度向多尺度,乃至动态或自适应尺度的发展,满足应用中对未知尺寸小目标同步快速检测的需要;局部对比度测度计算方法由简单到复杂、依据低阶信息到采用高阶信息的变化,有利于更全面地抑制复杂背景、进一步增强目标。因此,将成为未来人类视觉对比度机制小目标检测算法的发展方向。     

Structural similarity quality metrics in a coding context: exploring the space of realistic distortions

Perceptual image quality metrics have explicitly accounted for human visual system (HVS) sensitivity to subband noise by estimating just noticeable distortion (JND) thresholds. A recently proposed class of quality metrics, known as structural similarity metrics (SSIM), models perception implicitly by taking into account the fact that the HVS is adapted for extracting structural information from images. We evaluate SSIM metrics and compare their performance to traditional approaches in the context of realistic distortions that arise from compression and error concealment in video compression/transmission applications. In order to better explore this space of distortions, we propose models for simulating typical distortions encountered in such applications. We compare specific SSIM implementations both in the image space and the wavelet domain; these include the complex wavelet SSIM (CWSSIM), a translation-insensitive SSIM implementation. We also propose a perceptually weighted multiscale variant of CWSSIM, which introduces a viewing distance dependence and provides a natural way to unify the structural similarity approach with the traditional JND-based perceptual approaches.     

A multistage perceptual quality assessment for compressed digitalangiogram images

This paper describes a multistage perceptual quality assessment (MPQA) model for compressed images. The motivation for the development of a perceptual quality assessment is to measure (in)visible differences between original and processed images. The MPQA produces visible distortion maps and quantitative error measures informed by considerations of the human visual system (HVS). Original and decompressed images are decomposed into different spatial frequency bands and orientations modeling the human cortex. Contrast errors are calculated for each frequency and orientation, and masked as a function of contrast sensitivity and background uncertainty. Spatially masked contrast error measurements are then made across frequency bands and orientations to produce a single perceptual distortion visibility map (PDVM). A perceptual quality rating (PQR) is calculated from the PDVM and transformed into a one to five scale, PQR(1-5), for direct comparison with the mean opinion score, generally used in subjective ratings. The proposed MPQA model is based on existing perceptual quality assessment models, while it is differentiated by the inclusion of contrast masking as a function of background uncertainty. A pilot study of clinical experiments on wavelet-compressed digital angiogram has been performed on a sample set of angiogram images to identify diagnostically acceptable reconstruction. Our results show that the PQR(1-5) of diagnostically acceptable lossy image reconstructions have better agreement with cardiologists' responses than objective error measurement methods, such as peak signal-to-noise ratio A Perceptual thresholding and CSF-based Uniform quantization (PCU) method is also proposed using the vision models presented in this paper. The vision models are implemented in the thresholding and quantization stages of a compression algorithm and shown to produce improved compression ratio performance with less visible distortion than that of the embedded zerotrees wavelet (EZWs).     

基于人眼对比敏感视觉特性的彩色图像盲水印算法

为了解决水印透明性、鲁棒性与水印容量之间的平衡问题,结合人眼对比敏感度视觉特性,提出了一种彩色图像的盲水印算法。算法首先结合人眼对比敏感度视觉特性及其模型,在频域中计算人眼感知原始图像的对比敏感度阈值;其次结合人眼对强度的感知模型,计算水印图像信息的强度感知值;然后结合嵌入强度系数值,以感知原始图像的对比敏感度阈值为水印嵌入量的门限,实现数字水印的嵌入;最后依据密钥,采用逆过程提取水印。实验结果表明,在压缩质量因子为20%、中间剪切1/4区域的较强攻击下,提取水印与原水印的相似度达到0.78以上,且保证了较好的水印透明性。     

基于人眼视觉特性与自适应PCNN的医学图像融合算法

针对多尺度变换的图像特征,提出了一种基于人眼 视觉特性与自适应脉冲耦合神经网络(PCNN)的医学图像融合新方法。首先,对经配准的源图 像进行非下采样Contourlet变换(NSCT), 得到低频、高频子带系数;然后,考虑到低频子带系数中保留了绝大部分源图像能量和图像 轮廓特征,提出 区域能量(RE)和梯度奇异值度量(GSVM)相结合的方法;考虑到图像全局特 征,将PCNN用于高频子带系数中,提出区域视觉对比度(SLVC )模拟人眼视觉特性作为PCNN的 外部刺激输入,设定PCNN的链接强度随视觉对比敏感度(VCS) 自适应变化,同时考虑到PCNN的迭 代次数,利用Sigmoid函数计算其点火输出幅值的显著性度量;最后,对获得的融合系数进 行逆NSCT得到融合图像。通过实验对比分析表明,本文算法不仅可以保留源图像信息的同时 ,还得到较好的客观评价指标和视觉效果。