Objective methods for assessing perceptual image quality traditionally attempted to quantify the visibility of errors (differences) between a distorted image and a reference image using a variety of known properties of the human visual system. Under the assumption that human visual perception is highly adapted for extracting structural information from a scene, we introduce an alternative complementary framework for quality assessment based on the degradation of structural information. As a specific example of this concept, we develop a structural similarity index and demonstrate its promise through a set of intuitive examples, as well as comparison to both subjective ratings and state-of-the-art objective methods on a database of images compressed with JPEG and JPEG2000. A MATLAB implementation of the proposed algorithm is available online at http://www.cns.nyu.edu//spl sim/lcv/ssim/.

/pdf/image-quality-assessment-from-error-visibility-to-structural-1rlwcqe34t.pdf

Image quality assessment: from error visibility to structural similarity

Introduction to a Transient World. Fourier Kingdom. Discrete Revolution. Time Meets Frequency. Frames. Wavelet Zoom. Wavelet Bases. Wavelet Packet and Local Cosine Bases. An Approximation Tour. Estimations are Approximations. Transform Coding. Appendix A: Mathematical Complements. Appendix B: Software Toolboxes.

http://ahvazdownload.persiangig.com/document/article/39.pdf

A wavelet tour of signal processing

We investigate conditional adversarial networks as a general-purpose solution to image-to-image translation problems. These networks not only learn the mapping from input image to output image, but also learn a loss function to train this mapping. This makes it possible to apply the same generic approach to problems that traditionally would require very different loss formulations. We demonstrate that this approach is effective at synthesizing photos from label maps, reconstructing objects from edge maps, and colorizing images, among other tasks. Moreover, since the release of the pix2pix software associated with this paper, hundreds of twitter users have posted their own artistic experiments using our system. As a community, we no longer hand-engineer our mapping functions, and this work suggests we can achieve reasonable results without handengineering our loss functions either.

/pdf/image-to-image-translation-with-conditional-adversarial-5058t24et2.pdf

Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks

We investigate conditional adversarial networks as a general-purpose solution to image-to-image translation problems. These networks not only learn the mapping from input image to output image, but also learn a loss function to train this mapping. This makes it possible to apply the same generic approach to problems that traditionally would require very different loss formulations. We demonstrate that this approach is effective at synthesizing photos from label maps, reconstructing objects from edge maps, and colorizing images, among other tasks. Indeed, since the release of the pix2pix software associated with this paper, a large number of internet users (many of them artists) have posted their own experiments with our system, further demonstrating its wide applicability and ease of adoption without the need for parameter tweaking. As a community, we no longer hand-engineer our mapping functions, and this work suggests we can achieve reasonable results without hand-engineering our loss functions either.

Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

Publisher Summary This chapter examines objective criteria for the evaluation of image quality as perceived by an average human observer The focus is on image fidelity, ie, how close an image is to a given original or reference image This paradigm of image quality assessment (QA) is also known as full reference image QA Three classes of image QA algorithms that correlate with visual perception significantly better are discussed—human vision based metrics, Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) metrics, and information theoretic metrics Each of these techniques approaches the image QA problem from a different perspective and using different first principles In addition to these QA techniques, this chapter also highlights the similarities, dissimilarities, and interplay between these seemingly diverse techniques

/pdf/image-quality-assessment-34d3lk4e7x.pdf

Image Quality Assessment

The error diffusion algorithm for digital halftoning is equivalent in form to a noise-shaping feedback coder, a class of delta-sigma modulator. The white noise assumption of the quantizer error is known to be false; in fact, the quantizer error is seen to be highly correlated with the input image. To account for this correlation, we use a gain model for the quantizer. This model accurately predicts the edge sharpening and noise shaping caused by all error diffusion schemes. It also permits an extension of error diffusion to oversampled imagery.

/pdf/digital-halftoning-as-2-d-delta-sigma-modulation-505tnccsgy.pdf

Digital halftoning as 2-D delta-sigma modulation

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) remains a very challenging problem due to the unavailability of a reference image. Deep learning based BIQA methods have been attracting increasing attention in recent years, yet it remains a difficult task to train a robust deep BIQA model because of the very limited number of training samples with human subjective scores. Most existing methods learn a regression network to minimize the prediction error of a scalar image quality score. However, such a scheme ignores the fact that an image will receive divergent subjective scores from different subjects, which cannot be adequately represented by a single scalar number. This is particularly true on complex, real-world distorted images. Moreover, images may broadly differ in their distributions of assigned subjective scores. Recognizing this, we propose a new representation of perceptual image quality, called probabilistic quality representation (PQR), to describe the image subjective score distribution, whereby a more robust loss function can be employed to train a deep BIQA model. The proposed PQR method is shown to not only speed up the convergence of deep model training, but to also greatly improve the achievable level of quality prediction accuracy relative to scalar quality score regression methods. The source code is available at this https URL.

A Probabilistic Quality Representation Approach to Deep Blind Image Quality Prediction.

Computed AM-FM models represent images in terms of instantaneous amplitude and frequency modulations. However, the instantaneous amplitude and frequency of a real valued image are ambiguous. We apply the directional 2D Hilbert transform to compute a complex extension for a real image. This extension, called the analytic image, admits most of the attractive properties of the 1D analytic signal. However, the analytic image is not unique: for a given real image, taking the Hilbert transform in the horizontal and vertical directions yields different complex extensions and differing computed AM-FM models. We show that these two differing models are essentially equivalent and develop explicit formulations relating them.

Alan C. Bovik

Papers

Image Quality Assessment

Digital halftoning as 2-D delta-sigma modulation

A Probabilistic Quality Representation Approach to Deep Blind Image Quality Prediction.

Skewed 2D Hilbert transforms and computed AM-FM models

No-reference image blur index based on singular value curve