25,425 research outputs found
Optimizing Filter-Probe Diffusion Weighting in the Rat Spinal Cord for Human Translation
Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a promising biomarker of spinal cord injury (SCI). In the acute aftermath, DTI in SCI animal models consistently demonstrates high sensitivity and prognostic performance, yet translation of DTI to acute human SCI has been limited. In addition to technical challenges, interpretation of the resulting metrics is ambiguous, with contributions in the acute setting from both axonal injury and edema. Novel diffusion MRI acquisition strategies such as double diffusion encoding (DDE) have recently enabled detection of features not available with DTI or similar methods. In this work, we perform a systematic optimization of DDE using simulations and an in vivo rat model of SCI and subsequently implement the protocol to the healthy human spinal cord. First, two complementary DDE approaches were evaluated using an orientationally invariant or a filter-probe diffusion encoding approach. While the two methods were similar in their ability to detect acute SCI, the filter-probe DDE approach had greater predictive power for functional outcomes. Next, the filter-probe DDE was compared to an analogous single diffusion encoding (SDE) approach, with the results indicating that in the spinal cord, SDE provides similar contrast with improved signal to noise. In the SCI rat model, the filter-probe SDE scheme was coupled with a reduced field of view (rFOV) excitation, and the results demonstrate high quality maps of the spinal cord without contamination from edema and cerebrospinal fluid, thereby providing high sensitivity to injury severity. The optimized protocol was demonstrated in the healthy human spinal cord using the commercially-available diffusion MRI sequence with modifications only to the diffusion encoding directions. Maps of axial diffusivity devoid of CSF partial volume effects were obtained in a clinically feasible imaging time with a straightforward analysis and variability comparable to axial diffusivity derived from DTI. Overall, the results and optimizations describe a protocol that mitigates several difficulties with DTI of the spinal cord. Detection of acute axonal damage in the injured or diseased spinal cord will benefit the optimized filter-probe diffusion MRI protocol outlined here
High definition H.264/AVC subjective video database for evaluating the influence of slice losses on quality perception
Prior to the construction or validation of objective video quality metrics, ground-truth data must be collected by means of a subjective video database. This database consists of (impaired) video sequences and corresponding subjective quality ratings. However, creating this subjective database is a timeconsuming and expensive task. There is an ongoing effort towards publishing such subjective video databases into the public domain. This facilitates the development of new objective quality metrics. In this paper, we present a new subjective video database consisting of impaired High Definition H. 264/AVC encoded video sequences and associated quality ratings gathered from a subjective experiment. This database can be used freely to determine impairment visibility or estimate overall quality of a video in the case of lost slices due to network impairments
Constructing a no-reference H.264/AVC bitstream-based video quality metric using genetic programming-based symbolic regression
In order to ensure optimal quality of experience toward end users during video streaming, automatic video quality assessment becomes an important field-of-interest to video service providers. Objective video quality metrics try to estimate perceived quality with high accuracy and in an automated manner. In traditional approaches, these metrics model the complex properties of the human visual system. More recently, however, it has been shown that machine learning approaches can also yield competitive results. In this paper, we present a novel no-reference bitstream-based objective video quality metric that is constructed by genetic programming-based symbolic regression. A key benefit of this approach is that it calculates reliable white-box models that allow us to determine the importance of the parameters. Additionally, these models can provide human insight into the underlying principles of subjective video quality assessment. Numerical results show that perceived quality can be modeled with high accuracy using only parameters extracted from the received video bitstream
Bridge the Gap Between VQA and Human Behavior on Omnidirectional Video: A Large-Scale Dataset and a Deep Learning Model
Omnidirectional video enables spherical stimuli with the viewing range. Meanwhile, only the viewport region of omnidirectional
video can be seen by the observer through head movement (HM), and an even
smaller region within the viewport can be clearly perceived through eye
movement (EM). Thus, the subjective quality of omnidirectional video may be
correlated with HM and EM of human behavior. To fill in the gap between
subjective quality and human behavior, this paper proposes a large-scale visual
quality assessment (VQA) dataset of omnidirectional video, called VQA-OV, which
collects 60 reference sequences and 540 impaired sequences. Our VQA-OV dataset
provides not only the subjective quality scores of sequences but also the HM
and EM data of subjects. By mining our dataset, we find that the subjective
quality of omnidirectional video is indeed related to HM and EM. Hence, we
develop a deep learning model, which embeds HM and EM, for objective VQA on
omnidirectional video. Experimental results show that our model significantly
improves the state-of-the-art performance of VQA on omnidirectional video.Comment: Accepted by ACM MM 201
Roadmap on optical security
Postprint (author's final draft
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