1,579 research outputs found
Deep Neural Networks for No-Reference and Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment
We present a deep neural network-based approach to image quality assessment
(IQA). The network is trained end-to-end and comprises ten convolutional layers
and five pooling layers for feature extraction, and two fully connected layers
for regression, which makes it significantly deeper than related IQA models.
Unique features of the proposed architecture are that: 1) with slight
adaptations it can be used in a no-reference (NR) as well as in a
full-reference (FR) IQA setting and 2) it allows for joint learning of local
quality and local weights, i.e., relative importance of local quality to the
global quality estimate, in an unified framework. Our approach is purely
data-driven and does not rely on hand-crafted features or other types of prior
domain knowledge about the human visual system or image statistics. We evaluate
the proposed approach on the LIVE, CISQ, and TID2013 databases as well as the
LIVE In the wild image quality challenge database and show superior performance
to state-of-the-art NR and FR IQA methods. Finally, cross-database evaluation
shows a high ability to generalize between different databases, indicating a
high robustness of the learned features
Semantic Perceptual Image Compression using Deep Convolution Networks
It has long been considered a significant problem to improve the visual
quality of lossy image and video compression. Recent advances in computing
power together with the availability of large training data sets has increased
interest in the application of deep learning cnns to address image recognition
and image processing tasks. Here, we present a powerful cnn tailored to the
specific task of semantic image understanding to achieve higher visual quality
in lossy compression. A modest increase in complexity is incorporated to the
encoder which allows a standard, off-the-shelf jpeg decoder to be used. While
jpeg encoding may be optimized for generic images, the process is ultimately
unaware of the specific content of the image to be compressed. Our technique
makes jpeg content-aware by designing and training a model to identify multiple
semantic regions in a given image. Unlike object detection techniques, our
model does not require labeling of object positions and is able to identify
objects in a single pass. We present a new cnn architecture directed
specifically to image compression, which generates a map that highlights
semantically-salient regions so that they can be encoded at higher quality as
compared to background regions. By adding a complete set of features for every
class, and then taking a threshold over the sum of all feature activations, we
generate a map that highlights semantically-salient regions so that they can be
encoded at a better quality compared to background regions. Experiments are
presented on the Kodak PhotoCD dataset and the MIT Saliency Benchmark dataset,
in which our algorithm achieves higher visual quality for the same compressed
size.Comment: Accepted to Data Compression Conference, 11 pages, 5 figure
CAS-CNN: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Image Compression Artifact Suppression
Lossy image compression algorithms are pervasively used to reduce the size of
images transmitted over the web and recorded on data storage media. However, we
pay for their high compression rate with visual artifacts degrading the user
experience. Deep convolutional neural networks have become a widespread tool to
address high-level computer vision tasks very successfully. Recently, they have
found their way into the areas of low-level computer vision and image
processing to solve regression problems mostly with relatively shallow
networks.
We present a novel 12-layer deep convolutional network for image compression
artifact suppression with hierarchical skip connections and a multi-scale loss
function. We achieve a boost of up to 1.79 dB in PSNR over ordinary JPEG and an
improvement of up to 0.36 dB over the best previous ConvNet result. We show
that a network trained for a specific quality factor (QF) is resilient to the
QF used to compress the input image - a single network trained for QF 60
provides a PSNR gain of more than 1.5 dB over the wide QF range from 40 to 76.Comment: 8 page
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