42,101 research outputs found
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
Visual Comfort Assessment for Stereoscopic Image Retargeting
In recent years, visual comfort assessment (VCA) for 3D/stereoscopic content
has aroused extensive attention. However, much less work has been done on the
perceptual evaluation of stereoscopic image retargeting. In this paper, we
first build a Stereoscopic Image Retargeting Database (SIRD), which contains
source images and retargeted images produced by four typical stereoscopic
retargeting methods. Then, the subjective experiment is conducted to assess
four aspects of visual distortion, i.e. visual comfort, image quality, depth
quality and the overall quality. Furthermore, we propose a Visual Comfort
Assessment metric for Stereoscopic Image Retargeting (VCA-SIR). Based on the
characteristics of stereoscopic retargeted images, the proposed model
introduces novel features like disparity range, boundary disparity as well as
disparity intensity distribution into the assessment model. Experimental
results demonstrate that VCA-SIR can achieve high consistency with subjective
perception
Full Reference Objective Quality Assessment for Reconstructed Background Images
With an increased interest in applications that require a clean background
image, such as video surveillance, object tracking, street view imaging and
location-based services on web-based maps, multiple algorithms have been
developed to reconstruct a background image from cluttered scenes.
Traditionally, statistical measures and existing image quality techniques have
been applied for evaluating the quality of the reconstructed background images.
Though these quality assessment methods have been widely used in the past,
their performance in evaluating the perceived quality of the reconstructed
background image has not been verified. In this work, we discuss the
shortcomings in existing metrics and propose a full reference Reconstructed
Background image Quality Index (RBQI) that combines color and structural
information at multiple scales using a probability summation model to predict
the perceived quality in the reconstructed background image given a reference
image. To compare the performance of the proposed quality index with existing
image quality assessment measures, we construct two different datasets
consisting of reconstructed background images and corresponding subjective
scores. The quality assessment measures are evaluated by correlating their
objective scores with human subjective ratings. The correlation results show
that the proposed RBQI outperforms all the existing approaches. Additionally,
the constructed datasets and the corresponding subjective scores provide a
benchmark to evaluate the performance of future metrics that are developed to
evaluate the perceived quality of reconstructed background images.Comment: Associated source code: https://github.com/ashrotre/RBQI, Associated
Database:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bg8YRPIBcxpKIF9BIPisULPBPcA5x-Bk?usp=sharing
(Email for permissions at: ashrotreasuedu
Simulated Annealing for JPEG Quantization
JPEG is one of the most widely used image formats, but in some ways remains
surprisingly unoptimized, perhaps because some natural optimizations would go
outside the standard that defines JPEG. We show how to improve JPEG compression
in a standard-compliant, backward-compatible manner, by finding improved
default quantization tables. We describe a simulated annealing technique that
has allowed us to find several quantization tables that perform better than the
industry standard, in terms of both compressed size and image fidelity.
Specifically, we derive tables that reduce the FSIM error by over 10% while
improving compression by over 20% at quality level 95 in our tests; we also
provide similar results for other quality levels. While we acknowledge our
approach can in some images lead to visible artifacts under large
magnification, we believe use of these quantization tables, or additional
tables that could be found using our methodology, would significantly reduce
JPEG file sizes with improved overall image quality.Comment: Appendix not included in arXiv version due to size restrictions. For
full paper go to:
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/SimAnneal/PAPER/simulated-annealing-jpeg.pd
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