Reduced-Reference Video Quality Metric Using Spatial Information in Salient Regions

In multimedia transmission, it is important to rely on an objective quality metric which accurately represents the subjective quality of processed images and video sequences. Maintaining acceptable Quality of Experience in video transmission requires the ability to measure the quality of the video seen at the receiver end. Reduced-reference metrics make use of side-information that is transmitted to the receiver for estimating the quality of the received sequence with low complexity. This attribute enables real-time assessment and visual degradation detection caused by transmission and compression errors. A novel reduced-reference video quality known as the Spatial Information in Salient Regions Reduced Reference Metric is proposed. The approach proposed makes use of spatial activity to estimate the received sequence distortion after concealment. The statistical elements analysed in this work are based on extracted edges and their luminance distributions. Results highlight that the proposed edge dissimilarity measure has a good correlation with DMOS scores from the LIVE Video Database

Objective View Synthesis Quality Assessment

International audienceView synthesis brings geometric distortions which are not handled efficiently by existing image quality assessment metrics. Despite the widespread of 3-D technology and notably 3D television (3DTV) and free-viewpoints television (FTV), the field of view synthesis quality assessment has not yet been widely investigated and new quality metrics are required. In this study, we propose a new full-reference objective quality assessment metric: the View Synthesis Quality Assessment (VSQA) metric. Our method is dedicated to artifacts detection in synthesized view-points and aims to handle areas where disparity estimation may fail: thin objects, object borders, transparency, variations of illumination or color differences between left and right views, periodic objects... The key feature of the proposed method is the use of three visibility maps which characterize complexity in terms of textures, diversity of gradient orientations and presence of high contrast. Moreover, the VSQA metric can be defined as an extension of any existing 2D image quality assessment metric. Experimental tests have shown the effectiveness of the proposed method

A Novel Image Similarity Measure Based on Greatest and Smallest Eigen Fuzzy Sets

A novel image similarity index based on the greatest and smallest fuzzy set solutions of the max–min and min–max compositions of fuzzy relations, respectively, is proposed. The greatest and smallest fuzzy sets are found symmetrically as the min–max and max–min solutions, respectively, to a fuzzy relation equation. The original image is partitioned into squared blocks and the pixels in each block are normalized to [0, 1] in order to have a fuzzy relation. The greatest and smallest fuzzy sets, found for each block, are used to measure the similarity between the original image and the image reconstructed by joining the squared blocks. Comparison tests with other well-known image metrics are then carried out where source images are noised by applying Gaussian filters. The results show that the proposed image similarity measure is more effective and robust to noise than the PSNR and SSIM-based measures

Direct field-to-pattern monolithic design of holographic metasurface via residual encoder-decoder convolutional neural network

Complex-amplitude holographic metasurfaces (CAHMs) with the flexibility in modulating phase and amplitude profiles have been used to manipulate the propagation of wavefront with an unprecedented level, leading to higher image-reconstruction quality compared with their natural counterparts. However, prevailing design methods of CAHMs are based on Huygens-Fresnel theory, meta-atom optimization, numerical simulation and experimental verification, which results in a consumption of computing resources. Here, we applied residual encoder-decoder convolutional neural network to directly map the electric field distributions and input images for monolithic metasurface design. A pretrained network is firstly trained by the electric field distributions calculated by diffraction theory, which is subsequently migrated as transfer learning framework to map the simulated electric field distributions and input images. The training results show that the normalized mean pixel error is about 3% on dataset. As verification, the metasurface prototypes are fabricated, simulated and measured. The reconstructed electric field of reverse-engineered metasurface exhibits high similarity to the target electric field, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our design. Encouragingly, this work provides a monolithic field-to-pattern design method for CAHMs, which paves a new route for the direct reconstruction of metasurfaces

Spatiotemporal Video Quality Assessment Method via Multiple Feature Mappings

Progressed video quality assessment (VQA) methods aim to evaluate the perceptual quality of videos in many applications but often prompt to increase computational complexity. Problems derive from the complexity of the distorted videos that are of significant concern in the communication industry, as well as the spatial-temporal content of the two-fold (spatial and temporal) distortion. Therefore, the findings of the study indicate that the information in the spatiotemporal slice (STS) images are useful in measuring video distortion. This paper mainly focuses on developing on a full reference video quality assessment algorithm estimator that integrates several features of spatiotemporal slices (STSS) of frames to form a high-performance video quality. This research work aims to evaluate video quality by utilizing several VQA databases by the following steps: (1) we first arrange the reference and test video sequences into a spatiotemporal slice representation. A collection of spatiotemporal feature maps were computed on each reference-test video. These response features are then processed by using a Structural Similarity (SSIM) to form a local frame quality.  (2) To further enhance the quality assessment, we combine the spatial feature maps with the spatiotemporal feature maps and propose the VQA model, named multiple map similarity feature deviation (MMSFD-STS). (3) We apply a sequential pooling strategy to assemble the quality indices of frames in the video quality scoring. (4) Extensive evaluations on video quality databases show that the proposed VQA algorithm achieves better/competitive performance as compared with other state- of- the- art methods

Directive local color transfer based on dynamic look-up table

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