Underlying elements of image quality assessment: : Preference and terminology for communicating image quality characteristics

Image quality markedly affects the evaluation of images, and its control is crucial in studies using natural visual scenes as stimuli. Various image elements, such as sharpness or naturalness, can impact how observers view images and more directly how they evaluate their quality. To gain a better understanding of the types of interactions between these various elements, we conducted a study with a large set of images with multiple overlapping distortions, covering a wide range of quality variation. Observers assigned a quality rating on a 0-10 scale plus a verbal description of the images, explaining the elements on which their rating was based. Regression model predicting image quality ratings using 68 attributes uncovered the link between verbal descriptions and quality ratings and the importance of the image quality rating for each of the 68 image attributes. Brightness, naturalness, and good colors seem to be related to the highest image quality preference. However, the most important elements for predicting good image quality were related to image fidelity such as graininess and sharpness. This indicates that a certain level of image fidelity must be achieved before more subjective associations with, for instance, naturalness can emerge. Of the attributes, 72% had a negative impact on the preference judgment. This negative bias may be due to the fact that there are more ways that observers can perceive an image to fail than to excel when they are asked to evaluate image quality.Image quality markedly affects the evaluation of images, and its control is crucial in studies using natural visual scenes as stimuli. Various image elements, such as sharpness or naturalness, can impact how observers view images and, more directly, how they evaluate their quality. To gain a better understanding of the types of interactions between these various elements, we conducted a study with a large set of images with multiple overlapping distortions, covering a wide range of quality variation. Observers assigned a quality rating of the images on a 0–10 scale and gave a verbal description explaining the elements on which their rating was based. A regression model predicting image quality ratings using 68 attributes uncovered the link between verbal descriptions and quality ratings and the importance of the image quality rating for each of the 68 image attributes. Brightness, naturalness, and good colors seem to be related to the highest image quality preference. However, the most important elements for predicting good image quality were related to image fidelity such as graininess and sharpness. This indicates that a certain level of image fidelity must be achieved before more subjective associations with, for instance, naturalness can emerge. Of the attributes, 72% had a negative impact on the preference judgment. This negative bias may be due to the fact that there are more ways that observers can perceive an image to fail than to excel when they are asked to evaluate image quality.Peer reviewe

Micro-computed tomography pore-scale study of flow in porous media: Effect of voxel resolution

A fundamental understanding of flow in porous media at the pore-scale is necessary to be able to upscale average displacement processes from core to reservoir scale. The study of fluid flow in porous media at the pore-scale consists of two key procedures: Imaging - reconstruction of three-dimensional (3D) pore space images; and modelling such as with single and two-phase flow simulations with Lattice-Boltzmann (LB) or Pore-Network (PN) Modelling. Here we analyse pore-scale results to predict petrophysical properties such as porosity, single-phase permeability and multi-phase properties at different length scales. The fundamental issue is to understand the image resolution dependency of transport properties, in order to up-scale the flow physics from pore to core scale. In this work, we use a high resolution micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) scanner to image and reconstruct three dimensional pore-scale images of five sandstones (Bentheimer, Berea, Clashach, Doddington and Stainton) and five complex carbonates (Ketton, Estaillades, Middle Eastern sample 3, Middle Eastern sample 5 and Indiana Limestone 1) at four different voxel resolutions (4.4 µm, 6.2 µm, 8.3 µm and 10.2 µm), scanning the same physical field of view. Implementing three phase segmentation (macro-pore phase, intermediate phase and grain phase) on pore-scale images helps to understand the importance of connected macro-porosity in the fluid flow for the samples studied. We then compute the petrophysical properties for all the samples using PN and LB simulations in order to study the influence of voxel resolution on petrophysical properties. We then introduce a numerical coarsening scheme which is used to coarsen a high voxel resolution image (4.4 µm) to lower resolutions (6.2 µm, 8.3 µm and 10.2 µm) and study the impact of coarsening data on macroscopic and multi-phase properties. Numerical coarsening of high resolution data is found to be superior to using a lower resolution scan because it avoids the problem of partial volume effects and reduces the scaling effect by preserving the pore-space properties influencing the transport properties. This is evidently compared in this study by predicting several pore network properties such as number of pores and throats, average pore and throat radius and coordination number for both scan based analysis and numerical coarsened data

Measuring and Predicting Importance of Objects in Our Visual World

Associating keywords with images automatically is an approachable and useful goal for visual recognition researchers. Keywords are distinctive and informative objects. We argue that keywords need to be sorted by 'importance', which we define as the probability of being mentioned first by an observer. We propose a method for measuring the `importance' of words using the object labels that multiple human observers give an everyday scene photograph. We model object naming as drawing balls from an urn, and fit this model to estimate `importance'; this combines order and frequency, enabling precise prediction under limited human labeling. We explore the relationship between the importance of an object in a particular image and the area, centrality, and saliency of the corresponding image patches. Furthermore, our data shows that many words are associated with even simple environments, and that few frequently appearing objects are shared across environments

Towards Understanding User Preferences from User Tagging Behavior for Personalization

Personalizing image tags is a relatively new and growing area of research, and in order to advance this research community, we must review and challenge the de-facto standard of defining tag importance. We believe that for greater progress to be made, we must go beyond tags that merely describe objects that are visually represented in the image, towards more user-centric and subjective notions such as emotion, sentiment, and preferences. We focus on the notion of user preferences and show that the order that users list tags on images is correlated to the order of preference over the tags that they provided for the image. While this observation is not completely surprising, to our knowledge, we are the first to explore this aspect of user tagging behavior systematically and report empirical results to support this observation. We argue that this observation can be exploited to help advance the image tagging (and related) communities. Our contributions include: 1.) conducting a user study demonstrating this observation, 2.) collecting a dataset with user tag preferences explicitly collected.Comment: 6 page

Understanding Image Virality

Virality of online content on social networking websites is an important but esoteric phenomenon often studied in fields like marketing, psychology and data mining. In this paper we study viral images from a computer vision perspective. We introduce three new image datasets from Reddit, and define a virality score using Reddit metadata. We train classifiers with state-of-the-art image features to predict virality of individual images, relative virality in pairs of images, and the dominant topic of a viral image. We also compare machine performance to human performance on these tasks. We find that computers perform poorly with low level features, and high level information is critical for predicting virality. We encode semantic information through relative attributes. We identify the 5 key visual attributes that correlate with virality. We create an attribute-based characterization of images that can predict relative virality with 68.10% accuracy (SVM+Deep Relative Attributes) -- better than humans at 60.12%. Finally, we study how human prediction of image virality varies with different `contexts' in which the images are viewed, such as the influence of neighbouring images, images recently viewed, as well as the image title or caption. This work is a first step in understanding the complex but important phenomenon of image virality. Our datasets and annotations will be made publicly available.Comment: Pre-print, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 201

VIP: Finding Important People in Images

People preserve memories of events such as birthdays, weddings, or vacations by capturing photos, often depicting groups of people. Invariably, some individuals in the image are more important than others given the context of the event. This paper analyzes the concept of the importance of individuals in group photographs. We address two specific questions -- Given an image, who are the most important individuals in it? Given multiple images of a person, which image depicts the person in the most important role? We introduce a measure of importance of people in images and investigate the correlation between importance and visual saliency. We find that not only can we automatically predict the importance of people from purely visual cues, incorporating this predicted importance results in significant improvement in applications such as im2text (generating sentences that describe images of groups of people)