870 research outputs found
Comparing temporal behavior of fast objective video quality measures on a large-scale database
In many application scenarios, video quality assessment is required to be fast and reasonably accurate. The characterisation of objective algorithms by subjective assessment is well established but limited due to the small number of test samples. Verification using large-scale objectively annotated databases provides a complementary solution. In this contribution, three simple but fast measures are compared regarding their agreement on a large-scale database. In contrast to subjective experiments, not only sequence-wise but also framewise agreement can be analyzed. Insight is gained into the behavior of the measures with respect to 5952 different coding configurations of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). Consistency within a video sequence is analyzed as well as across video sequences. The results show that the occurrence of discrepancies depends mostly on the configured coding structure and the source content. The detailed observations stimulate questions on the combined usage of several video quality measures for encoder optimization
Image interpolation using Shearlet based iterative refinement
This paper proposes an image interpolation algorithm exploiting sparse
representation for natural images. It involves three main steps: (a) obtaining
an initial estimate of the high resolution image using linear methods like FIR
filtering, (b) promoting sparsity in a selected dictionary through iterative
thresholding, and (c) extracting high frequency information from the
approximation to refine the initial estimate. For the sparse modeling, a
shearlet dictionary is chosen to yield a multiscale directional representation.
The proposed algorithm is compared to several state-of-the-art methods to
assess its objective as well as subjective performance. Compared to the cubic
spline interpolation method, an average PSNR gain of around 0.8 dB is observed
over a dataset of 200 images
Optimizing Perceptual Quality Prediction Models for Multimedia Processing Systems
L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen
Sparse Modeling for Image and Vision Processing
In recent years, a large amount of multi-disciplinary research has been
conducted on sparse models and their applications. In statistics and machine
learning, the sparsity principle is used to perform model selection---that is,
automatically selecting a simple model among a large collection of them. In
signal processing, sparse coding consists of representing data with linear
combinations of a few dictionary elements. Subsequently, the corresponding
tools have been widely adopted by several scientific communities such as
neuroscience, bioinformatics, or computer vision. The goal of this monograph is
to offer a self-contained view of sparse modeling for visual recognition and
image processing. More specifically, we focus on applications where the
dictionary is learned and adapted to data, yielding a compact representation
that has been successful in various contexts.Comment: 205 pages, to appear in Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics
and Visio
Image Quality Estimation: Soft-ware for Objective Evaluation
Digital images are widely used in our daily lives and the quality of images is important to the viewing experience. Low quality images may be blurry or contain noise or compression artifacts. Humans can easily estimate image quality, but it is not practical to use human subjects to measure image quality in real applications. Image Quality Estimators (QE) are algorithms that evaluate image qualities automatically. These QEs compute scores of any input images to represent their qualities. This thesis mainly focuses on evaluating the performance of QEs. Two approaches used in this work are objective software analysis and the subjective database design.
For the first, we create a software consisting of functional modules to test QE performances. These modules can load images from subjective databases or generate distortion images from any input images. Their QE scores are computed and analyzed by the statistical method module so that they can be easily interpreted and reported. Some modules in this software are combined and formed into a published software package: Stress Testing Image Quality Estimators (STIQE).
In addition to the QE analysis software, a new subjective database is designed and implemented using both online and in-lab subjective tests. The database is designed using the pairwise comparison method and the subjective quality scores are computed using the Bradley-Terry model and Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE). While four testing phases are designed for this databases, only phase 1 is reported in this work
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Image Understanding and Robotics Research at Columbia University
The research investigations of the Vision/Robotics Laboratory at Columbia University reflect the diversity of interests of its four faculty members, two staff programmers and 15 Ph.D. students. Several of the projects involve either a visiting computer science post-doc, other faculty members in the department or the university, or researchers at AT&T Bell Laboratories or Philips laboratories. We list below a summary of our interest and results, together with the principal researchers associated with them. Since it is difficult to separate those aspects of robotic research that are purely visual from those that are vision-like (for example, tactile sensing) or vision-related (for example, integrated vision-robotic systems), we have listed all robotic research that is not purely manipulative
Joint estimation of reverberation time and early-to-late reverberation ratio from single-channel speech signals
The reverberation time (RT) and the early-to-late reverberation ratio (ELR) are two key parameters commonly used to characterize acoustic room environments. In contrast to conventional blind estimation methods that process the two parameters separately, we propose a model for joint estimation to predict the RT and the ELR simultaneously from single-channel speech signals from either full-band or sub-band frequency data, which is referred to as joint room parameter estimator (jROPE). An artificial neural network is employed to learn the mapping from acoustic observations to the RT and the ELR classes. Auditory-inspired acoustic features obtained by temporal modulation filtering of the speech time-frequency representations are used as input for the neural network. Based on an in-depth analysis of the dependency between the RT and the ELR, a two-dimensional (RT, ELR) distribution with constrained boundaries is derived, which is then exploited to evaluate four different configurations for jROPE. Experimental results show that-in comparison to the single-task ROPE system which individually estimates the RT or the ELR-jROPE provides improved results for both tasks in various reverberant and (diffuse) noisy environments. Among the four proposed joint types, the one incorporating multi-task learning with shared input and hidden layers yields the best estimation accuracies on average. When encountering extreme reverberant conditions with RTs and ELRs lying beyond the derived (RT, ELR) distribution, the type considering RT and ELR as a joint parameter performs robustly, in particular. From state-of-the-art algorithms that were tested in the acoustic characterization of environments challenge, jROPE achieves comparable results among the best for all individual tasks (RT and ELR estimation from full-band and sub-band signals)
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