6,567 research outputs found
A Perceptually Based Comparison of Image Similarity Metrics
The assessment of how well one image matches another forms a critical component both of models of human visual processing and of many image analysis systems. Two of the most commonly used norms for quantifying image similarity are L1 and L2, which are specific instances of the Minkowski metric. However, there is often not a principled reason for selecting one norm over the other. One way to address this problem is by examining whether one metric, better than the other, captures the perceptual notion of image similarity. This can be used to derive inferences regarding similarity criteria the human visual system uses, as well as to evaluate and design metrics for use in image-analysis applications. With this goal, we examined perceptual preferences for images retrieved on the basis of the L1 versus the L2 norm. These images were either small fragments without recognizable content, or larger patterns with recognizable content created by vector quantization. In both conditions the participants showed a small but consistent preference for images matched with the L1 metric. These results suggest that, in the domain of natural images of the kind we have used, the L1 metric may better capture human notions of image similarity
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual
similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite
complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as
PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many
nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found
that features of the VGG network trained on ImageNet classification has been
remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual
are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their
success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new dataset of human
perceptual similarity judgments. We systematically evaluate deep features
across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics.
We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by large margins on
our dataset. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to
ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures
and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised).
Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared
across deep visual representations.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2018; Code and data available at
https://www.github.com/richzhang/PerceptualSimilarit
Copyright Protection of Color Imaging Using Robust-Encoded Watermarking
In this paper we present a robust-encoded watermarking method applied to color images for copyright protection, which presents robustness against several geometric and signal processing distortions. Trade-off between payload, robustness and imperceptibility is a very important aspect which has to be considered when a watermark algorithm is designed. In our proposed scheme, previously to be embedded into the image, the watermark signal is encoded using a convolutional encoder, which can perform forward error correction achieving better robustness performance. Then, the embedding process is carried out through the discrete cosine transform domain (DCT) of an image using the image normalization technique to accomplish robustness against geometric and signal processing distortions. The embedded watermark coded bits are extracted and decoded using the Viterbi algorithm. In order to determine the presence or absence of the watermark into the image we compute the bit error rate (BER) between the recovered and the original watermark data sequence. The quality of the watermarked image is measured using the well-known indices: Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). The color difference between the watermarked and original images is obtained by using the Normalized Color Difference (NCD) measure. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides good performance in terms of imperceptibility and robustness. The comparison among the proposed and previously reported methods based on different techniques is also provided
Contrast Enhancement of Brightness-Distorted Images by Improved Adaptive Gamma Correction
As an efficient image contrast enhancement (CE) tool, adaptive gamma
correction (AGC) was previously proposed by relating gamma parameter with
cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the pixel gray levels within an
image. ACG deals well with most dimmed images, but fails for globally bright
images and the dimmed images with local bright regions. Such two categories of
brightness-distorted images are universal in real scenarios, such as improper
exposure and white object regions. In order to attenuate such deficiencies,
here we propose an improved AGC algorithm. The novel strategy of negative
images is used to realize CE of the bright images, and the gamma correction
modulated by truncated CDF is employed to enhance the dimmed ones. As such,
local over-enhancement and structure distortion can be alleviated. Both
qualitative and quantitative experimental results show that our proposed method
yields consistently good CE results
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