Image Quality Assessment by Saliency Maps

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is an interesting challenge for image processing applications. The goal of IQA is to replace human judgement of perceived image quality with a machine evaluation. A large number of methods have been proposed to evaluate the quality of an image which may be corrupted by noise, distorted during acquisition, transmission, compression, etc. Many methods, in some cases, do not agree with human judgment because they are not correlated with human visual perception. In the last years the most modern IQA models and metrics considered visual saliency as a fundamental issue. The aim of visual saliency is to produce a saliency map that replicates the human visual system (HVS) behaviour in visual attention process. In this paper we show the relationship between different kind of visual saliency maps and IQA measures. We particularly perform a lot of comparisons between Saliency-Based IQA Measures and traditional Objective IQA Measure. In Saliency scientific literature there are many different approaches for saliency maps, we want to investigate which is best one for IQA metrics

Full Reference Video Quality Model for UHD HEVC Encoded Sequences

International audienceDespite its relative robustness, subjective video quality evaluation is a time-consuming and costly process. Alternatives are required therefore to simplify visual quality estimation, particularly in the case of new video formats. This paper presents an analysis of full reference quality metrics focused on Ultra High Definition sequences, encoded with H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding. After evaluating the individual performance of three objective video quality metrics - structural similarity, gradient difference, and motion distortion - an optimal combination is defined, to be weighted by three perceptibility criteria, considering luminance, motion, and texture masks, in uniform and selective perception contexts. Performances at each step are compared by correlation, to subjective scores of each sequence given by Subjective Assessment Methodology of Video Quality session. A close correlation to subjective quality measurements is measured applying three indicators

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

Perceptual video quality and quality of experience for adaptive video streaming

We live in a world where images and videos dominate our everyday lives. Every day, an enormous amount of video data is being shared in social media and consumer applications, while video streaming is becoming a new form of digital entertainment. Large-scale video streaming on demand has become possible thanks to numerous engineering achievements in fields such as video compression, high-speed computation and display technologies. Nevertheless, the skyrocketing needs for bandwidth and network resources consumed by video applications challenges modern video content delivery. Since the available bandwidth resources are limited, streaming service providers have to mediate between operation costs, bandwidth efficiency and maximizing user quality of experience. However, these goals are inherently conflicting and require knowledge of how user quality of experience is affected by the network-induced changes in video quality. Being able to understand and predict user quality of experience and perceptually optimize rate allocation, can have significant effects in better network utilization, reduced costs for service providers and improved user satisfaction. The goal of this dissertation is to study and predict user quality of experience in video streaming applications, by exploiting perceptual video quality and human behavioral responses to streaming-related video impairments. To this end, I present the details of three large-scale video subjective studies which target video streaming under multiple viewing conditions, such as display device, session duration, content characteristics and network/buffer conditions. By analyzing how humans react to changes in visual quality and streaming video impairments, I also design numerous video quality and quality of experience prediction models that can be used to evaluate the overall and the continuous-time perceived video quality. Throughout this dissertation, my goal is to perceptually optimize various stages of the video streaming pipeline, such as video encoding and video quality control as well as client-based rate adaptation. Ultimately, I envision that the outcome of this dissertation can be useful for video streaming applications at global scaleElectrical and Computer Engineerin