The measurement of meaning

Changing network conditions pose severe problems to video streaming in the Internet. HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) is a technology employed by numerous video services that relieves these issues by adapting the video to the current network conditions. It enables service providers to improve resource utilization and Quality of Experience (QoE) by incorporating information from different layers in order to deliver and adapt a video in its best possible quality. Thereby, it allows taking into account end user device capabilities, available video quality levels, current network conditions, and current server load. For end users, the major benefits of HAS compared to classical HTTP video streaming are reduced interruptions of the video playback and higher bandwidth utilization, which both generally result in a higher QoE. Adaptation is possible by changing the frame rate, resolution, or quantization of the video, which can be done with various adaptation strategies and related client- and server-side actions. The technical development of HAS, existing open standardized solutions, but also proprietary solutions are reviewed in this paper as fundamental to derive the QoE influence factors that emerge as a result of adaptation. The main contribution is a comprehensive survey of QoE related works from human computer interaction and networking domains, which are structured according to the QoE impact of video adaptation. To be more precise, subjective studies that cover QoE aspects of adaptation dimensions and strategies are revisited. As a result, QoE influence factors of HAS and corresponding QoE models are identified, but also open issues and conflicting results are discussed. Furthermore, technical influence factors, which are often ignored in the context of HAS, affect perceptual QoE influence factors and are consequently analyzed. This survey gives the reader an overview of the current state of the art and recent developments. At the same time, it targets networking researchers who develop new solutions for HTTP video streaming or assess video streaming from a user centric point of view. Therefore, this paper is a major step toward truly improving HAS.

A Survey on Quality of Experience of HTTP Adaptive Streaming

Quality evaluation of underwater images is a key goal of underwater video image retrieval and intelligent processing. To date, no metric has been proposed for underwater color image quality evaluation (UCIQE). The special absorption and scattering characteristics of the water medium do not allow direct application of natural color image quality metrics especially to different underwater environments. In this paper, subjective testing for underwater image quality has been organized. The statistical distribution of the underwater image pixels in the CIELab color space related to subjective evaluation indicates the sharpness and colorful factors correlate well with subjective image quality perception. Based on these, a new UCIQE metric, which is a linear combination of chroma, saturation, and contrast, is proposed to quantify the non-uniform color cast, blurring, and low-contrast that characterize underwater engineering and monitoring images. Experiments are conducted to illustrate the performance of the proposed UCIQE metric and its capability to measure the underwater image enhancement results. They show that the proposed metric has comparable performance to the leading natural color image quality metrics and the underwater grayscale image quality metrics available in the literature, and can predict with higher accuracy the relative amount of degradation with similar image content in underwater environments. Importantly, UCIQE is a simple and fast solution for real-time underwater video processing. The effectiveness of the presented measure is also demonstrated by subjective evaluation. The results show better correlation between the UCIQE and the subjective mean opinion score.

An Underwater Color Image Quality Evaluation Metric

This paper offers a review of present achievements in the field of processing of ceramic-based materials with complex geometry using the main additive manufacturing (AM) technologies In AM, the geometrical design of a desired ceramic-based component is combined with the materials design In this way, the fabrication times and the product costs of ceramic-based parts with required properties can be substantially reduced However, dimensional accuracy and surface finish still remain crucial features in today's AM due to the layer-by-layer formation of the parts In spite of the fact that significant progress has been made in the development of feedstock materials, the most difficult limitations for AM technologies are the restrictions set by material selection for each AM method and aspects considering the inner architectural design of the manufactured parts Hence, any future progress in the field of AM should be based on the improvement of the existing technologies or, alternatively, the development of new approaches with an emphasis on parts allowing the near-net formation of ceramic structures, while optimizing the design of new materials and of the part architecture

Additive Manufacturing of Ceramic‐Based Materials

Quality is a very important parameter for all objects and their functionalities. In image-based object recognition, image quality is a prime criterion. For authentic image quality evaluation, ground truth is required. But in practice, it is very difficult to find the ground truth. Usually, image quality is being assessed by full reference metrics, like MSE (Mean Square Error) and PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio). In contrast to MSE and PSNR, recently, two more full reference metrics SSIM (Structured Similarity Indexing Method) and FSIM (Feature Similarity Indexing Method) are developed with a view to compare the structural and feature similarity measures between restored and original objects on the basis of perception. This paper is mainly stressed on comparing different image quality metrics to give a comprehensive view. Experimentation with these metrics using benchmark images is performed through denoising for different noise concentrations. All metrics have given consistent results. However, from representation perspective, SSIM and FSIM are normalized, but MSE and PSNR are not; and from semantic perspective, MSE and PSNR are giving only absolute error; on the other hand, SSIM and PSNR are giving perception and saliency-based error. So, SSIM and FSIM can be treated more understandable than the MSE and PSNR.

/pdf/image-quality-assessment-through-fsim-ssim-mse-and-psnr-a-18245qbzdr.pdf

Image Quality Assessment through FSIM, SSIM, MSE and PSNR—A Comparative Study

Perceptual approaches have been widely used in many areas of visual information processing. This paper presents an overview of perceptual based approaches for image enhancement, segmentation and coding. The paper also provides a brief review of image quality assessment (IQA) methods, which are used to evaluate the performance of visual information processing techniques. The intent of this paper is not to review all the relevant works that have appeared in the literature, but rather to focus on few topics that have been extensively researched and developed over the past few decades. The goal is to present a perspective as broad as possible on this actively evolving domain due to relevant advances in vision research and signal processing. Therefore, for each topic, we identify the main contributions of perceptual approaches and their limitations, and outline how perceptual vision has influenced current state-of-the-art techniques in image enhancement, segmentation, coding and visual information quality assessment.

/pdf/a-survey-of-perceptual-image-processing-methods-u1pt52xzif.pdf

A survey of perceptual image processing methods

3D meshes are deployed in a wide range of application processes (e.g., transmission, compression, simplification, watermarking and so on) which inevitably introduce geometric distortions that may alter the visual quality of the rendered data. Hence, efficient model-based perceptual metrics, operating on the geometry of the meshes being compared, have been recently introduced to control and predict these visual artifacts. However, since the 3D models are ultimately visualized on 2D screens, it seems legitimate to use images of the models (i.e., snapshots from different viewpoints) to evaluate their visual fidelity. In this work we investigate the use of image metrics to assess the visual quality of 3D models. For this goal, we conduct a wide-ranging study involving several 2D metrics, rendering algorithms, lighting conditions and pooling algorithms, as well as several mean opinion score databases. The collected data allow (1) to determine the best set of parameters to use for this image-based quality assessment approach and (2) to compare this approach to the best performing model-based metrics and determine for which use-case they are respectively adapted. We conclude by exploring several applications that illustrate the benefits of image-based quality assessment.

On the Efficiency of Image Metrics for Evaluating the Visual Quality of 3D Models

The past decades have witnessed the tremendous growth of digital image processing techniques for visual information representation and communication. Particularly, computational representation of perceived image quality has become a fundamental problem in computer vision and image processing. It is well known that the commonly used Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), although analysis friendly, falls far short of this need. In this work, we propose a reduced reference (RR) perceptual image quality measure (IQM) based on the grouplet transform. Given a reference image and its “distorted” version, we first compute the grouplet transform in order to extract the information of textures and directions of both images. Then, contrast sensitivity function (CSF) filtering is performed to obtain same visual sensitivity information within both images. Thereafter, based on the properties of the human visual system (HVS), rational sensitivity thresholding is performed to obtain the sensitivity coefficients of both images. Finally, RR image quality assessment (IQA) is performed by comparing the sensitivity coefficients of both images.

A grouplet-based reduced reference image quality assessment

Understanding the attentional behavior of the human visual system when visualizing a rendered 3D shape is of great importance for many computer graphics applications. Eye tracking remains the only solution to explore this complex cognitive mechanism. Unfortunately, despite the large number of studies dedicated to images and videos, only a few eye tracking experiments have been conducted using 3D shapes. Thus, potential factors that may influence the human gaze in the specific setting of 3D, are still to be understood. In this work, we conduct two eye-tracking experiments involving 3D shapes, with both static and time-varying camera positions. We propose a method for mapping eye fixations (i.e., where humans gaze) onto the 3D shapes with the aim to produce a benchmark of 3D meshes with fixation density maps, which is publicly available. First, the collected data is used to study the influence of shape, camera position, material and illumination on visual attention. We find that material and lighting have a significant influence on attention, as well as the camera path in the case of dynamic scenes. Then, we compare the performance of four representative state-of-the-art mesh saliency models in predicting ground-truth fixations using two different metrics. We show that, even combined with a center-bias model, the performance of 3D saliency algorithms remains poor at predicting human fixations. To explain their weaknesses, we provide a qualitative analysis of the main factors that attract human attention. We finally provide a quantitative comparison of human-eye fixations and Schelling points and show that their correlation is weak.

Visual Attention for Rendered 3D Shapes

In this work a new Reduced Reference (RR) Video Quality Metric (VQM) is proposed. The method takes advantage of the Human Visual System (HVS) sensitivity to sharp changes in the video. The proposed method has a spatial-temporal approach and because of that it is named as STAQ (Spatial-Temporal Assessment of Quality). In the first step of STAQ we take a temporal approach and find the matching regions in consecutive frames. In the next step, a spatial approach is taken in the way of calculating the quality of the matching regions in the temporal approach. In the last step, the quality of the video is calculated based on the parameters gathered in the spatial and temporal domain and using the motion activity density of the video as a controlling factor. An important improvement lies in taking into account the Quality of Experience (QoE) represented as the motion activity density of the reference video. The results show a great improvement in the case of H.264 and MPEG-2 compressed and IP distorted videos even when compared to state of the art Full Reference (FR) metrics.

/pdf/spatial-temporal-video-quality-metric-based-on-an-estimation-4wccng7isl.pdf

Mohamed-Chaker Larabi

Papers

A survey of perceptual image processing methods

On the Efficiency of Image Metrics for Evaluating the Visual Quality of 3D Models

A grouplet-based reduced reference image quality assessment

Visual Attention for Rendered 3D Shapes

Spatial-temporal Video Quality Metric based on an estimation of QoE