A Reduced-Reference Metric Based on the Interest Points in Color Images

28th Picture Coding Symposium (PCS 2010)In the last decade, an important research effort has been dedicated to quality assessment from the subjective and the objective points of view. The focus was mainly on Full Reference (FR) metrics because of the ability to compare to an original. Only few works were oriented to Reduced Reference (RR) or No Reference (NR) metrics, very useful for applications where the original image is not available such as transmission or monitoring. In this work, we propose an RR metric based on two concepts, the interest points of the image and the objects saliency on color images. This metric needs a very low amount of data (lower than 8 bytes) to be able to compute the quality scores. The results show a high correlation between the metric scores and the human judgement and a better quality range than well-known metrics like PSNR or SSIM. Finally, interest points have shown that they can predict the quality of color images

New instruments and technologies for Cultural Heritage survey: full integration between point clouds and digital photogrammetry

In the last years the Geomatic Research Group of the Politecnico di Torino faced some new research topics about new instruments for point cloud generation (e.g. Time of Flight cameras) and strong integration between multi-image matching techniques and 3D Point Cloud information in order to solve the ambiguities of the already known matching algorithms. ToF cameras can be a good low cost alternative to LiDAR instruments for the generation of precise and accurate point clouds: up to now the application range is still limited but in a near future they will be able to satisfy the most part of the Cultural Heritage metric survey requirements. On the other hand multi-image matching techniques with a correct and deep integration of the point cloud information can give the correct solution for an "intelligent" survey of the geometric object break-lines, which are the correct starting point for a complete survey. These two research topics are strictly connected to a modern Cultural Heritage 3D survey approach. In this paper after a short analysis of the achieved results, an alternative possible scenario for the development of the metric survey approach inside the wider topic of Cultural Heritage Documentation is reporte

Modelling, Measuring and Compensating Color Weak Vision

We use methods from Riemann geometry to investigate transformations between the color spaces of color-normal and color weak observers. The two main applications are the simulation of the perception of a color weak observer for a color normal observer and the compensation of color images in a way that a color weak observer has approximately the same perception as a color normal observer. The metrics in the color spaces of interest are characterized with the help of ellipsoids defined by the just-noticable-differences between color which are measured with the help of color-matching experiments. The constructed mappings are isometries of Riemann spaces that preserve the perceived color-differences for both observers. Among the two approaches to build such an isometry, we introduce normal coordinates in Riemann spaces as a tool to construct a global color-weak compensation map. Compared to previously used methods this method is free from approximation errors due to local linearizations and it avoids the problem of shifting locations of the origin of the local coordinate system. We analyse the variations of the Riemann metrics for different observers obtained from new color matching experiments and describe three variations of the basic method. The performance of the methods is evaluated with the help of semantic differential (SD) tests.Comment: Full resolution color pictures are available from the author

Towards Automatic SAR-Optical Stereogrammetry over Urban Areas using Very High Resolution Imagery

In this paper we discuss the potential and challenges regarding SAR-optical stereogrammetry for urban areas, using very-high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing imagery. Since we do this mainly from a geometrical point of view, we first analyze the height reconstruction accuracy to be expected for different stereogrammetric configurations. Then, we propose a strategy for simultaneous tie point matching and 3D reconstruction, which exploits an epipolar-like search window constraint. To drive the matching and ensure some robustness, we combine different established handcrafted similarity measures. For the experiments, we use real test data acquired by the Worldview-2, TerraSAR-X and MEMPHIS sensors. Our results show that SAR-optical stereogrammetry using VHR imagery is generally feasible with 3D positioning accuracies in the meter-domain, although the matching of these strongly hetereogeneous multi-sensor data remains very challenging. Keywords: Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), optical images, remote sensing, data fusion, stereogrammetr