Human visual system model

About: Human visual system model is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 8697 publications have been published within this topic receiving 259440 citations.

A no-reference perceptual image sharpness metric based on saliency-weighted foveal pooling

Abstract: A no-reference perceptual sharpness quality metric, inspired by visual attention information, is presented for a better simulation of the Human Visual System (HVS) response to blur distortions. Saliency information about a scene is used to accentuate blur distortions around edges present in conspicuous areas and attenuate those distortions present in the rest of the image. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed metric.

Emotion schemas are embedded in the human visual system

Abstract: Theorists have suggested that emotions are canonical responses to situations ancestrally linked to survival. If so, then emotions may be afforded by features of the sensory environment. However, few computational models describe how combinations of stimulus features evoke different emotions. Here, we develop a convolutional neural network that accurately decodes images into 11 distinct emotion categories. We validate the model using more than 25,000 images and movies and show that image content is sufficient to predict the category and valence of human emotion ratings. In two functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, we demonstrate that patterns of human visual cortex activity encode emotion category-related model output and can decode multiple categories of emotional experience. These results suggest that rich, category-specific visual features can be reliably mapped to distinct emotions, and they are coded in distributed representations within the human visual system.

Spatiotemporal Visual Considerations for Video Coding

Abstract: Human visual sensitivity varies with not only spatial frequencies, but moving velocities of image patterns. Moreover, the loss of visual sensitivity due to object motions might be compensated by eye movement. Removing the psychovisual redundancies in both the spatial and temporal frequency domains facilitates an efficient coder without perceptual degradation. Motivated by this, a visual measure is proposed for the purpose of video compressions. The novelty of this analysis relies on combining three visual factors altogether: the motion attention model, unconstrained eye-movement incorporated spatiovelocity visual sensitivity model, and visual masking model. For each motion-unattended macroblock, the retinal velocity is evaluated so that discrete cosine transform coefficients to which the human visual system has low sensitivity are picked up with the aid of eye movement incorporated spatiovelocity visual model. Based on masking thresholds of those low-sensitivity coefficients, a spatiotemporal distortion masking measure is determined. Accordingly, quantization parameters at macroblock level for video coding are adjusted on the basis of this measure. Experiments conducted by H.264 exhibit the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in improving coding performance without picture quality degradation

Blind Predicting Similar Quality Map for Image Quality Assessment

Abstract: A key problem in blind image quality assessment (BIQA) is how to effectively model the properties of human visual system in a data-driven manner. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient BIQA model based on a novel framework which consists of a fully convolutional neural network (FCNN) and a pooling network to solve this problem. In principle, FCNN is capable of predicting a pixel-by-pixel similar quality map only from a distorted image by using the intermediate similarity maps derived from conventional full-reference image quality assessment methods. The predicted pixel-by-pixel quality maps have good consistency with the distortion correlations between the reference and distorted images. Finally, a deep pooling network regresses the quality map into a score. Experiments have demonstrated that our predictions outperform many state-of-the-art BIQA methods.

Color Constancy Using Double-Opponency

Abstract: The double-opponent (DO) color-sensitive cells in the primary visual cortex (V1) of the human visual system (HVS) have long been recognized as the physiological basis of color constancy. In this work we propose a new color constancy model by imitating the functional properties of the HVS from the single-opponent (SO) cells in the retina to the DO cells in V1 and the possible neurons in the higher visual cortexes. The idea behind the proposed double-opponency based color constancy (DOCC) model originates from the substantial observation that the color distribution of the responses of DO cells to the color-biased images coincides well with the vector denoting the light source color. Then the illuminant color is easily estimated by pooling the responses of DO cells in separate channels in LMS space with the pooling mechanism of $sum$ or $max$ . Extensive evaluations on three commonly used datasets, including the test with the dataset dependent optimal parameters, as well as the intra- and inter-dataset cross validation, show that our physiologically inspired DOCC model can produce quite competitive results in comparison to the state-of-the-art approaches, but with a relative simple implementation and without requiring fine-tuning of the method for each different dataset.