55% new material in the latest edition of this "must-have" for students and practitioners of image & video processing!This Handbook is intended to serve as the basic reference point on image and ...video processing, in the field, in the research laboratory, and in the classroom. Each chapter has been written by carefully selected, distinguished experts specializing in that topic and carefully reviewed by the Editor, Al Bovik, ensuring that the greatest depth of understanding be communicated to the reader. Coverage includes introductory, intermediate and advanced topics and as such, this book serves equally well as classroom textbook as reference resource. . Provides practicing engineers and students with a highly accessible resource for learning and using image/video processing theory and algorithms . Includes a new chapter on image processing education, which should prove invaluable for those developing or modifying their curricula . Covers the various image and video processing standards that exist and are emerging, driving today's explosive industry . Offers an understanding of what images are, how they are modeled, and gives an introduction to how they are perceived . Introduces the necessary, practical background to allow engineering students to acquire and process their own digital image or video data . Culminates with a diverse set of applications chapters, covered in sufficient depth to serve as extensible models to the reader's own potential applications About the Editor. Al Bovik is the Cullen Trust for Higher Education Endowed Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is the Director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE). He has published over 400 technical articles in the general area of image and video processing and holds two U.S. patents. Dr. Bovik was Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2000), received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award (1998), the IEEE Third Millennium Medal (2000), and twice was a two-time Honorable Mention winner of the international Pattern Recognition Society Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, was Editor-in-Chief, of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (1996-2002), has served on and continues to serve on many other professional boards and panels, and was the Founding General Chairman of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing which was held in Austin, Texas in 1994.
* No other resource for image and video processing contains the same breadth of up-to-date coverage* Each chapter written by one or several of the top experts working in that area* Includes all essential mathematics, techniques, and algorithms for every type of image and video processing used by electrical engineers, computer scientists, internet developers, bioengineers, and scientists in various, image-intensive disciplines
A complete introduction to the basic and intermediate concepts of image processing from the leading people in the fieldA CD-ROM contains 70 highly interactive demonstration programs with user ...friendly interfaces to provide a visual presentation of the conceptsUp-to-date content, including statistical modeling of natural, anistropic diffusion, image quality and the latest developments in JPEG 2000 This comprehensive and state-of-the art approach to image processing gives engineers and students a thorough introduction, and includes full coverage of key applications: image watermarking, fingerprint recognition, face recognition and iris recognition and medical imaging. To help learn the concepts and techniques, the book contains a CD-ROM of 70 highly interactive visual demonstrations. Key algorithms and their implementation details are included, along with the latest developments in the standards. "This book combines basic image processing techniques with some of the most advanced procedures. Introductory chapters dedicated to general principles are presented alongside detailed application-orientated ones. As a result it is suitably adapted for different classes of readers, ranging from Master to PhD students and beyond." - Prof. Jean-Philippe Thiran, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland "Al Bovik's compendium proceeds systematically from fundamentals to today's research frontiers. Professor Bovik, himself a highly respected leader in the field, has invited an all-star team of contributors. Students, researchers, and practitioners of image processing alike should benefit from the Essential Guide." - Prof. Bernd Girod, Stanford University, USA "This book is informative, easy to read with plenty of examples, and allows great flexibility in tailoring a course on image processing or analysis." - Prof. Pamela Cosman, University of California, San Diego, USA
* A complete and modern introduction to the basic and intermediate concepts of image processing - edited and written by the leading people in the field* An essential reference for all types of engineers working on image processing applications* A CD-ROM contains 70 highly interactive demonstration programs with user friendly interfaces to provide a visual presentation of the concepts* Up-to-date content, including statistical modelling of natural, anisotropic diffusion, image quality and the latest developments in JPEG 2000
Most publicly available image quality databases have been created under highly controlled conditions by introducing graded simulated distortions onto high-quality photographs. However, images ...captured using typical real-world mobile camera devices are usually afflicted by complex mixtures of multiple distortions, which are not necessarily well-modeled by the synthetic distortions found in existing databases. The originators of existing legacy databases usually conducted human psychometric studies to obtain statistically meaningful sets of human opinion scores on images in a stringently controlled visual environment, resulting in small data collections relative to other kinds of image analysis databases. Toward overcoming these limitations, we designed and created a new database that we call the LIVE In the Wild Image Quality Challenge Database, which contains widely diverse authentic image distortions on a large number of images captured using a representative variety of modern mobile devices. We also designed and implemented a new online crowdsourcing system, which we have used to conduct a very large-scale, multi-month image quality assessment (IQA) subjective study. Our database consists of over 350 000 opinion scores on 1162 images evaluated by over 8100 unique human observers. Despite the lack of control over the experimental environments of the numerous study participants, we demonstrate excellent internal consistency of the subjective data set. We also evaluate several top-performing blind IQA algorithms on it and present insights on how the mixtures of distortions challenge both end users as well as automatic perceptual quality prediction models. The new database is available for public use at <;uri xlink:href="http://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/ChallengeDB/index.html" xlink:type="simple">http://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/ChallengeDB/index.html<;/uri>.
Existing blind image quality assessment (BIQA) methods are mostly opinion-aware. They learn regression models from training images with associated human subjective scores to predict the perceptual ...quality of test images. Such opinion-aware methods, however, require a large amount of training samples with associated human subjective scores and of a variety of distortion types. The BIQA models learned by opinion-aware methods often have weak generalization capability, hereby limiting their usability in practice. By comparison, opinion-unaware methods do not need human subjective scores for training, and thus have greater potential for good generalization capability. Unfortunately, thus far no opinion-unaware BIQA method has shown consistently better quality prediction accuracy than the opinion-aware methods. Here, we aim to develop an opinion-unaware BIQA method that can compete with, and perhaps outperform, the existing opinion-aware methods. By integrating the features of natural image statistics derived from multiple cues, we learn a multivariate Gaussian model of image patches from a collection of pristine natural images. Using the learned multivariate Gaussian model, a Bhattacharyya-like distance is used to measure the quality of each image patch, and then an overall quality score is obtained by average pooling. The proposed BIQA method does not need any distorted sample images nor subjective quality scores for training, yet extensive experiments demonstrate its superior quality-prediction performance to the state-of-the-art opinion-aware BIQA methods. The MATLAB source code of our algorithm is publicly available at www.comp.polyu.edu.hk/~cslzhang/IQA/ILNIQE/ILNIQE.htm.
Current top-performing blind perceptual image quality prediction models are generally trained on legacy databases of human quality opinion scores on synthetically distorted images. Therefore, they ...learn image features that effectively predict human visual quality judgments of inauthentic and usually isolated (single) distortions. However, real-world images usually contain complex composite mixtures of multiple distortions. We study the perceptually relevant natural scene statistics of such authentically distorted images in different color spaces and transform domains. We propose a "bag of feature maps" approach that avoids assumptions about the type of distortion(s) contained in an image and instead focuses on capturing consistencies-or departures therefrom-of the statistics of real-world images. Using a large database of authentically distorted images, human opinions of them, and bags of features computed on them, we train a regressor to conduct image quality prediction. We demonstrate the competence of the features toward improving automatic perceptual quality prediction by testing a learned algorithm using them on a benchmark legacy database as well as on a newly introduced distortion-realistic resource called the LIVE In the Wild Image Quality Challenge Database. We extensively evaluate the perceptual quality prediction model and algorithm and show that it is able to achieve good-quality prediction power that is better than other leading models.
Recent years have witnessed an explosion of user-generated content (UGC) videos shared and streamed over the Internet, thanks to the evolution of affordable and reliable consumer capture devices, and ...the tremendous popularity of social media platforms. Accordingly, there is a great need for accurate video quality assessment (VQA) models for UGC/consumer videos to monitor, control, and optimize this vast content. Blind quality prediction of in-the-wild videos is quite challenging, since the quality degradations of UGC videos are unpredictable, complicated, and often commingled. Here we contribute to advancing the UGC-VQA problem by conducting a comprehensive evaluation of leading no-reference/blind VQA (BVQA) features and models on a fixed evaluation architecture, yielding new empirical insights on both subjective video quality studies and objective VQA model design. By employing a feature selection strategy on top of efficient BVQA models, we are able to extract 60 out of 763 statistical features used in existing methods to create a new fusion-based model, which we dub the VIDeo quality EVALuator (VIDEVAL), that effectively balances the trade-off between VQA performance and efficiency. Our experimental results show that VIDEVAL achieves state-of-the-art performance at considerably lower computational cost than other leading models. Our study protocol also defines a reliable benchmark for the UGC-VQA problem, which we believe will facilitate further research on deep learning-based VQA modeling, as well as perceptually-optimized efficient UGC video processing, transcoding, and streaming. To promote reproducible research and public evaluation, an implementation of VIDEVAL has been made available online: https://github.com/vztu/VIDEVAL .
We present a family of reduced reference video quality assessment (QA) models that utilize spatial and temporal entropic differences. We adopt a hybrid approach of combining statistical models and ...perceptual principles to design QA algorithms. A Gaussian scale mixture model for the wavelet coefficients of frames and frame differences is used to measure the amount of spatial and temporal information differences between the reference and distorted videos, respectively. The spatial and temporal information differences are combined to obtain the spatio-temporal-reduced reference entropic differences. The algorithms are flexible in terms of the amount of side information required from the reference that can range between a single scalar per frame and the entire reference information. The spatio-temporal entropic differences are shown to correlate quite well with human judgments of quality, as demonstrated by experiments on the LIVE video quality assessment database.
Over-the-top mobile adaptive video streaming is invariably influenced by volatile network conditions, which can cause playback interruptions (stalling or rebuffering events) and bitrate fluctuations, ...thereby impairing users' quality of experience (QoE). Video quality assessment models that can accurately predict users' QoE under such volatile network conditions are rapidly gaining attention, since these methods could enable more efficient design of quality control protocols for media-driven services such as YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, and many others. However, the development of improved QoE prediction models requires data sets of videos afflicted with diverse stalling events that have been labeled with ground-truth subjective opinion scores. Toward this end, we have created a new mobile video quality database that we call LIVE Mobile Stall Video Database-II. Our database contains a total of 174 videos afflicted with distortions caused by 26 different stalling patterns. We describe the way we simulated the diverse stalling events to create a corpus of distorted videos, and we detail the human study we conducted to obtain continuous-time subjective scores from 54 subjects. We also present the outcomes of our comprehensive analysis of the impact of several factors that influence subjective QoE, and report the performance of existing QoE-prediction models on our data set. We are making the database (videos, subjective data, and video metadata) publicly available in order to help the advance state-of-the-art research on user-centric mobile network planning and management. The database may be accessed at http://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/LIVEStallStudy/liveMobile.html .
Image information and visual quality Sheikh, H.R.; Bovik, A.C.
IEEE transactions on image processing,
02/2006, Letnik:
15, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Measurement of visual quality is of fundamental importance to numerous image and video processing applications. The goal of quality assessment (QA) research is to design algorithms that can ...automatically assess the quality of images or videos in a perceptually consistent manner. Image QA algorithms generally interpret image quality as fidelity or similarity with a "reference" or "perfect" image in some perceptual space. Such "full-reference" QA methods attempt to achieve consistency in quality prediction by modeling salient physiological and psychovisual features of the human visual system (HVS), or by signal fidelity measures. In this paper, we approach the image QA problem as an information fidelity problem. Specifically, we propose to quantify the loss of image information to the distortion process and explore the relationship between image information and visual quality. QA systems are invariably involved with judging the visual quality of "natural" images and videos that are meant for "human consumption." Researchers have developed sophisticated models to capture the statistics of such natural signals. Using these models, we previously presented an information fidelity criterion for image QA that related image quality with the amount of information shared between a reference and a distorted image. In this paper, we propose an image information measure that quantifies the information that is present in the reference image and how much of this reference information can be extracted from the distorted image. Combining these two quantities, we propose a visual information fidelity measure for image QA. We validate the performance of our algorithm with an extensive subjective study involving 779 images and show that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art image QA algorithms by a sizeable margin in our simulations. The code and the data from the subjective study are available at the LIVE website.
Surface Water Mapping by Deep Learning Isikdogan, Furkan; Bovik, Alan C.; Passalacqua, Paola
IEEE journal of selected topics in applied earth observations and remote sensing,
11/2017, Letnik:
10, Številka:
11
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Mapping of surface water is useful in a variety of remote sensing applications, such as estimating the availability of water, measuring its change in time, and predicting droughts and floods. Using ...the imagery acquired by currently active Landsat missions, a surface water map can be generated from any selected region as often as every 8 days. Traditional Landsat water indices require carefully selected threshold values that vary depending on the region being imaged and on the atmospheric conditions. They also suffer from many false positives, arising mainly from snow and ice, and from terrain and cloud shadows being mistaken for water. Systems that produce high-quality water maps usually rely on ancillary data and complex rule-based expert systems to overcome these problems. Here, we instead adopt a data-driven, deep-learning-based approach to surface water mapping. We propose a fully convolutional neural network that is trained to segment water on Landsat imagery. Our proposed model, named Deep-WaterMap, learns the characteristics of water bodies from data drawn from across the globe. The trained model separates water from land, snow, ice, clouds, and shadows using only Landsat bands as input. Our code and trained models are publicly available at http://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/deepwatermap/.
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