Alan C. Bovik

TL;DR: In this article, the authors extended the concept of analog rank-order and order sfatistic (OS) filters to analog and digital signals and developed a formalism for relating the analog and continuous-time OS filters.

TL;DR: In this paper, the LIVE Mobile In-capture Video Quality Database (LIVEVMQDB) was created, which consists of 208 videos that were captured using eight different smart-phones and were affected by six common incapture distortions.

Abstract: User-generated contents (UGC) have gained increased attention in the video quality community recently. Perceptual video quality assessment (VQA) of UGC videos is of great significance for content providers to monitor, process, and deliver massive numbers of UGC videos. Blind video quality prediction of UGC videos is challenging since complex mixtures of spatial and temporal distortions contribute to the overall perceptual quality. In this paper, we develop a simple, effective, and efficient blind VQA framework (STS-QA) based on the statistical analysis of space-time slices (STS) of videos. Specifically, we extract spatio-temporal statistical features along different orientations of video STS, that capture directional global motion, then train a shallow quality predictor. The proposed framework can be used to easily extend any existing video/image quality model to account for temporal or motion regularities. Our experimental results on three publicly available UGC databases demonstrate that our proposed STS-QA model can significantly boost prediction performance compared to baselines. The code will be released at: https://github.com/uniqzheng/STS_BVQA.

TL;DR: The beginnings of a low-level theory of visual fixations in natural scenes are constructed by the formulation and verification a Barlow-type hypothesis for fixation selection—where the fixation patterns are designed to maximally contrast and textural information.