Evaluation of Psychoacoustic Sound Parameters for Sonification

Sonification designers have little theory or experimental evidence to guide the design of data-to-sound mappings. Many mappings use acoustic representations of data values which do not correspond with the listener's perception of how that data value should sound during sonification. This research evaluates data-to-sound mappings that are based on psychoacoustic sensations, in an attempt to move towards using data-to-sound mappings that are aligned with the listener's perception of the data value's auditory connotations. Multiple psychoacoustic parameters were evaluated over two experiments, which were designed in the context of a domain-specific problem - detecting the level of focus of an astronomical image through auditory display. Recommendations for designing sonification systems with psychoacoustic sound parameters are presented based on our results

New Datasets, Models, and Optimization

학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 공과대학 전기·정보공학부, 2021.8. 손현태.사진 촬영의 궁극적인 목표는 고품질의 깨끗한 영상을 얻는 것이다. 현실적으로, 일상의 사진은 자주 흔들린 카메라와 움직이는 물체가 있는 동적 환경에서 찍는다. 노출시간 중의 카메라와 피사체간의 상대적인 움직임은 사진과 동영상에서 모션 블러를 일으키며 시각적인 화질을 저하시킨다. 동적 환경에서 블러의 세기와 움직임의 모양은 매 이미지마다, 그리고 매 픽셀마다 다르다. 국지적으로 변화하는 블러의 성질은 사진과 동영상에서의 모션 블러 제거를 심각하게 풀기 어려우며 해답이 하나로 정해지지 않은, 잘 정의되지 않은 문제로 만든다. 물리적인 움직임 모델링을 통해 해석적인 접근법을 설계하기보다는 머신러닝 기반의 접근법은 이러한 잘 정의되지 않은 문제를 푸는 보다 현실적인 답이 될 수 있다. 특히 딥 러닝은 최근 컴퓨터 비전 학계에서 표준적인 기법이 되어 가고 있다. 본 학위논문은 사진 및 비디오 디블러링 문제에 대해 딥 러닝 기반 솔루션을 도입하며 여러 현실적인 문제를 다각적으로 다룬다. 첫 번째로, 디블러링 문제를 다루기 위한 데이터셋을 취득하는 새로운 방법을 제안한다. 모션 블러가 있는 이미지와 깨끗한 이미지를 시간적으로 정렬된 상태로 동시에 취득하는 것은 쉬운 일이 아니다. 데이터가 부족한 경우 디블러링 알고리즘들을 평가하는 것 뿐만 아니라 지도학습 기법을 개발하는 것도 불가능해진다. 그러나 고속 비디오를 사용하여 카메라 영상 취득 파이프라인을 모방하면 실제적인 모션 블러 이미지를 합성하는 것이 가능하다. 기존의 블러 합성 기법들과 달리 제안하는 방법은 여러 움직이는 피사체들과 다양한 영상 깊이, 움직임 경계에서의 가리워짐 등으로 인한 자연스러운 국소적 블러의 복잡도를 반영할 수 있다. 두 번째로, 제안된 데이터셋에 기반하여 새로운 단일영상 디블러링을 위한 뉴럴 네트워크 구조를 제안한다. 최적화기법 기반 이미지 디블러링 방식에서 널리 쓰이고 있는 점차적 미세화 접근법을 반영하여 다중규모 뉴럴 네트워크를 설계한다. 제안된 다중규모 모델은 비슷한 복잡도를 가진 단일규모 모델들보다 높은 복원 정확도를 보인다. 세 번째로, 비디오 디블러링을 위한 순환 뉴럴 네트워크 모델 구조를 제안한다. 디블러링을 통해 고품질의 비디오를 얻기 위해서는 각 프레임간의 시간적인 정보와 프레임 내부적인 정보를 모두 사용해야 한다. 제안하는 내부프레임 반복적 연산구조는 두 정보를 효과적으로 함께 사용함으로써 모델 파라미터 수를 증가시키지 않고도 디블러 정확도를 향상시킨다. 마지막으로, 새로운 디블러링 모델들을 보다 잘 최적화하기 위해 로스 함수를 제안한다. 깨끗하고 또렷한 사진 한 장으로부터 자연스러운 모션 블러를 만들어내는 것은 블러를 제거하는 것과 마찬가지로 어려운 문제이다. 그러나 통상 사용하는 로스 함수로 얻은 디블러링 방법들은 블러를 완전히 제거하지 못하며 디블러된 이미지의 남아있는 블러로부터 원래의 블러를 재건할 수 있다. 제안하는 리블러링 로스 함수는 디블러링 수행시 모션 블러를 보다 잘 제거하도록 설계되었다. 이에 나아가 제안한 자기지도학습 과정으로부터 테스트시 모델이 새로운 데이터에 적응하도록 할 수 있다. 이렇게 제안된 데이터셋, 모델 구조, 그리고 로스 함수를 통해 딥 러닝에 기반하여 단일 영상 및 비디오 디블러링 기법들을 제안한다. 광범위한 실험 결과로부터 정량적 및 정성적으로 최첨단 디블러링 성과를 증명한다.Obtaining a high-quality clean image is the ultimate goal of photography. In practice, daily photography is often taken in dynamic environments with moving objects as well as shaken cameras. The relative motion between the camera and the objects during the exposure causes motion blur in images and videos, degrading the visual quality. The degree of blur strength and the shape of motion trajectory varies by every image and every pixel in dynamic environments. The locally-varying property makes the removal of motion blur in images and videos severely ill-posed. Rather than designing analytic solutions with physical modelings, using machine learning-based approaches can serve as a practical solution for such a highly ill-posed problem. Especially, deep-learning has been the recent standard in computer vision literature. This dissertation introduces deep learning-based solutions for image and video deblurring by tackling practical issues in various aspects. First, a new way of constructing the datasets for dynamic scene deblurring task is proposed. It is nontrivial to simultaneously obtain a pair of the blurry and the sharp image that are temporally aligned. The lack of data prevents the supervised learning techniques to be developed as well as the evaluation of deblurring algorithms. By mimicking the camera image pipeline with high-speed videos, realistic blurry images could be synthesized. In contrast to the previous blur synthesis methods, the proposed approach can reflect the natural complex local blur from and multiple moving objects, varying depth, and occlusion at motion boundaries. Second, based on the proposed datasets, a novel neural network architecture for single-image deblurring task is presented. Adopting the coarse-to-fine approach that is widely used in energy optimization-based methods for image deblurring, a multi-scale neural network architecture is derived. Compared with the single-scale model with similar complexity, the multi-scale model exhibits higher accuracy and faster speed. Third, a light-weight recurrent neural network model architecture for video deblurring is proposed. In order to obtain a high-quality video from deblurring, it is important to exploit the intrinsic information in the target frame as well as the temporal relation between the neighboring frames. Taking benefits from both sides, the proposed intra-frame iterative scheme applied to the RNNs achieves accuracy improvements without increasing the number of model parameters. Lastly, a novel loss function is proposed to better optimize the deblurring models. Estimating a dynamic blur for a clean and sharp image without given motion information is another ill-posed problem. While the goal of deblurring is to completely get rid of motion blur, conventional loss functions fail to train neural networks to fulfill the goal, leaving the trace of blur in the deblurred images. The proposed reblurring loss functions are designed to better eliminate the motion blur and to produce sharper images. Furthermore, the self-supervised learning process facilitates the adaptation of the deblurring model at test-time. With the proposed datasets, model architectures, and the loss functions, the deep learning-based single-image and video deblurring methods are presented. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively.1 Introduction 1 2 Generating Datasets for Dynamic Scene Deblurring 7 2.1 Introduction 7 2.2 GOPRO dataset 9 2.3 REDS dataset 11 2.4 Conclusion 18 3 Deep Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Networks for Single Image Deblurring 19 3.1 Introduction 19 3.1.1 Related Works 21 3.1.2 Kernel-Free Learning for Dynamic Scene Deblurring 23 3.2 Proposed Method 23 3.2.1 Model Architecture 23 3.2.2 Training 26 3.3 Experiments 29 3.3.1 Comparison on GOPRO Dataset 29 3.3.2 Comparison on Kohler Dataset 33 3.3.3 Comparison on Lai et al. [54] dataset 33 3.3.4 Comparison on Real Dynamic Scenes 34 3.3.5 Effect of Adversarial Loss 34 3.4 Conclusion 41 4 Intra-Frame Iterative RNNs for Video Deblurring 43 4.1 Introduction 43 4.2 Related Works 46 4.3 Proposed Method 50 4.3.1 Recurrent Video Deblurring Networks 51 4.3.2 Intra-Frame Iteration Model 52 4.3.3 Regularization by Stochastic Training 56 4.4 Experiments 58 4.4.1 Datasets 58 4.4.2 Implementation details 59 4.4.3 Comparisons on GOPRO [72] dataset 59 4.4.4 Comparisons on [97] Dataset and Real Videos 60 4.5 Conclusion 61 5 Learning Loss Functions for Image Deblurring 67 5.1 Introduction 67 5.2 Related Works 71 5.3 Proposed Method 73 5.3.1 Clean Images are Hard to Reblur 73 5.3.2 Supervision from Reblurring Loss 75 5.3.3 Test-time Adaptation by Self-Supervision 76 5.4 Experiments 78 5.4.1 Effect of Reblurring Loss 78 5.4.2 Effect of Sharpness Preservation Loss 80 5.4.3 Comparison with Other Perceptual Losses 81 5.4.4 Effect of Test-time Adaptation 81 5.4.5 Comparison with State-of-The-Art Methods 82 5.4.6 Real World Image Deblurring 85 5.4.7 Combining Reblurring Loss with Other Perceptual Losses 86 5.4.8 Perception vs. Distortion Trade-Off 87 5.4.9 Visual Comparison of Loss Function 88 5.4.10 Implementation Details 89 5.4.11 Determining Reblurring Module Size 94 5.5 Conclusion 95 6 Conclusion 97 국문 초록 115 감사의 글 117박

Perceptual Image Quality Of Launch Vehicle Imaging Telescopes

A large fleet (in the hundreds) of high quality telescopes are used for tracking and imaging of launch vehicles during ascent from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Kennedy Space Center. A maintenance tool has been development for use with these telescopes. The tool requires rankings of telescope condition in terms of the ability to generate useful imagery. It is thus a case of ranking telescope conditions on the basis of the perceptual image quality of their imagery. Perceptual image quality metrics that are well-correlated to observer opinions of image quality have been available for several decades. However, these are quite limited in their applications, not being designed to compare various optical systems. The perceptual correlation of the metrics implies that a constant image quality curve (such as the boundary between two qualitative categories labeled as excellent and good) would have a constant value of the metric. This is not the case if the optical system parameters (such as object distance or aperture diameter) are varied. No published data on such direct variation is available and this dissertation presents an investigation made into the perceptual metric responses as system parameters are varied. This investigation leads to some non-intuitive conclusions. The perceptual metrics are reviewed as well as more common metrics and their inability to perform in the necessary manner for the research of interest. Perceptual test methods are also reviewed, as is the human visual system. iv Image formation theory is presented in a non-traditional form, yielding the surprising result that perceptual image quality is invariant under changes in focal length if the final displayed image remains constant. Experimental results are presented of changes in perceived image quality as aperture diameter is varied. Results are analyzed and shortcomings in the process and metrics are discussed. Using the test results, predictions are made about the form of the metric response to object distance variations, and subsequent testing was conducted to validate the predictions. The utility of the results, limitations of applicability, and the immediate ability to further generalize the results is presented

Scene classification with respect to image quality measurements

Psychophysical image quality assessments have shown that subjective quality depended upon the pictorial content of the test images. This study is concerned with the nature of scene dependency, which causes problems in modeling and predicting image quality. This paper focuses on scene classification to resolve this issue and used K-means clustering to classify test scenes. The aim was to classify thirty two original test scenes that were previously used in a psychophysical investigation conducted by the authors, according to their susceptibility to sharpness and noisiness. The objective scene classification involved: 1) investigation of various scene descriptors, derived to describe properties that influence image quality, and 2) investigation of the degree of correlation between scene descriptors and scene susceptibility parameters. Scene descriptors that correlated with scene susceptibility in sharpness and in noisiness are assumed to be useful in the objective scene classification. The work successfully derived three groups of scenes. The findings indicate that there is a potential for tackling the problem of sharpness and noisiness scene susceptibility when modeling image quality. In addition, more extensive investigations of scene descriptors would be required at global and local image levels in order to achieve sufficient accuracy of objective scene classification

Quality Assessment for CRT and LCD Color Reproduction Using a Blind Metric

This paper deals with image quality assessment that is capturing the focus of several research teams from academic and industrial parts. This field has an important role in various applications related to image from acquisition to projection. A large numbers of objective image quality metrics have been developed during the last decade. These metrics are more or less correlated to end-user feedback and can be separated in three categories: 1) Full Reference (FR) trying to evaluate the impairment in comparison to the reference image, 2) Reduced Reference (RR) using some features extracted from an image to represent it and compare it with the distorted one and 3) No Reference (NR) measures known as distortions such as blockiness, blurriness,. . .without the use of a reference. Unfortunately, the quality assessment community have not achieved a universal image quality model and only empiricalmodels established on psychophysical experimentation are generally used. In this paper, we focus only on the third category to evaluate the quality of CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) and LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) color reproduction where a blind metric is, based on modeling a part of the human visual system behavior. The objective results are validated by single-media and cross-media subjective tests. This allows to study the ability of simulating displays on a reference one

The fewer reasons, the more you like it! : How decision-making heuristics of image quality estimation exploit the content of subjective experience

Peer reviewe

Augmented reality fonts with enhanced out-of-focus text legibility

In augmented reality, information is often distributed between real and virtual contexts, and often appears at different distances from the viewer. This raises the issues of (1) context switching, when attention is switched between real and virtual contexts, (2) focal distance switching, when the eye accommodates to see information in sharp focus at a new distance, and (3) transient focal blur, when information is seen out of focus, during the time interval of focal distance switching. This dissertation research has quantified the impact of context switching, focal distance switching, and transient focal blur on human performance and eye fatigue in both monocular and binocular viewing conditions. Further, this research has developed a novel font that when seen out-of-focus looks sharper than standard fonts. This SharpView font promises to mitigate the effect of transient focal blur. Developing this font has required (1) mathematically modeling out-of-focus blur with Zernike polynomials, which model focal deficiencies of human vision, (2) developing a focus correction algorithm based on total variation optimization, which corrects out-of-focus blur, and (3) developing a novel algorithm for measuring font sharpness. Finally, this research has validated these fonts through simulation and optical camera-based measurement. This validation has shown that, when seen out of focus, SharpView fonts are as much as 40 to 50% sharper than standard fonts. This promises to improve font legibility in many applications of augmented reality