Quality assessment of multiply and singly distorted stereoscopic images via adaptive construction of cyclopean views

A challenging problem confronted when designing a blind/no-reference (NR) stereoscopic image quality assessment (SIQA) algorithm is to simulate the quality assessment (QA) behavior of the human visual system (HVS) during binocular vision. An effective way to solve this problem is to estimate the quality of the merged single view created in the human brain which is also referred to as the cyclopean image. However, due to the difficulty in modeling the binocular fusion and rivalry properties of the HVS, obtaining effective cyclopean images for QA is non-trivial, and consequently previous NR SIQA algorithms either require the MOS/DMOS values of the distorted 3D images for training or ignore the quality analysis of the merged cyclopean view. In this paper, we focus on (1) constructing accurate and appropriate cyclopean views for QA of stereoscopic images by adaptively analyzing the distortion information of two monocular views, and (2) training NR SIQA models without requiring the assistance of the MOS/DMOS values in existing databases. Accordingly, we present an effective opinion-unaware SIQA algorithm called MUSIQUE-3D, which blindly assesses the quality of multiply and singly distorted stereoscopic images by analyzing quality degradations of both monocular and cyclopean views. The monocular view quality is estimated by an extended version of the MUSIQUE algorithm, and the cyclopean view quality is computed from the distortion parameter values predicted by a two-layer classification-regression model trained on a large 3D image dataset. Tests on various 3D image databases demonstrate the superiority of our method as compared with other state-of-the-art SIQA algorithms.     

Visual perception of computer-generated stereoscopic pictures: Toward the impact of image resolution

In comparison with the generation of monoscopic images, the time cost of rendering stereoscopic images is doubled. When generating stereoscopic images by computer algorithms, it is desirable to save the computational expense by decreasing the image resolution, without degrading the visual perceptual quality of the images. In this work, to evaluate the perceptual visual quality of computer-generated stereoscopic images (CGSIs), a data set consisting of stereoscopic images created with different horizontal and vertical resolutions was constructed. First, a series of subjective experiments for the analysis of various perceptual situations was conducted. The experimental results show that when the original image resolution was reduced by half, the image difference was not perceptible. In addition, based on full-reference (FR) and no-reference (NR) image quality measurement (IQM), a combined FR-and-NR CGSIQA model was established to predict perceptual quality. We perform weighting calculations for different combinations of FR and NR. The experimental results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms all the classical models.     

A perceptual stereoscopic image quality assessment model accounting for binocular combination behavior

Stereoscopic image quality assessment (SIQA) plays an important role in the development of 3D image processing. In this paper, a full-reference object SIQA model is built based on binocular summation channel and binocular difference channel. In our frame work, binocular combination behavior and how to experience the depth perception are thought to be the key factors to evaluate the quality of stereoscopic images. Differing from the current depth map methods, this method focuses on a new aspect, and an effective combination model is proposed based on the physiological findings in the Human Visual System (HVS). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed quality assessment metric significantly outperforms the existing metrics and can achieve higher consistency with subject quality assessment when predicting the quality of stereoscopic images that have been symmetrically distorted.     

Optimal display conditions for quantitative analysis of stereoscopic cerebral angiograms

For several years the authors have been using a stereoscopic display as a tool in the planning of stereotactic neurosurgical techniques. This PC-based workstation allows the surgeon to interact with and view vascular images in three dimensions, as well as to perform quantitative analysis of the three-dimensional (3-D) space. Some of the perceptual issues relevant to the presentation of medical images on this stereoscopic display were addressed in five experiments. The authors show that a number of parameters-namely the shape, color, and depth cue, associated with a cursor-as well as the image filtering and observer position, have a role in improving the observer's perception of a 3-D image and his ability to localize points within the stereoscopically presented 3-D image. However, an analysis of the results indicates that while varying these parameters can lead to an effect on the performance of individual observers, the effects are not consistent across observers, and the mean accuracy remains relatively constant under the different experimental conditions.     

Image information and visual quality.

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.     

Reduced-reference stereoscopic image quality assessment based on view and disparity zero-watermarks

As a practical and novel application of watermarking, this paper presents a zero-watermarking based objective reduced-reference stereoscopic image quality assessment (RR-SIQA) method. In the proposed method, two kinds of zero-watermarks are constructed according to the characteristics of image structure and stereoscopic perception. Concretely, two view zero-watermarks, which are constructed by judging the relation of the horizontal and vertical components of gradient vectors with respect to the two views, are used to reflect the image structure variation of the stereoscopic image. Meanwhile, a disparity zero-watermark, which is constructed with disparity map of the stereoscopic image, is used to reflect the stereoscopic perception quality variation. Then, the quality of stereoscopic image is objectively assessed by pooling the recovering rates of the detected zero-watermarks. The experimental results show that the stereoscopic image quality evaluation results assessed with the proposed RR-SIQA method are well consistent with subjective assessment, and the proposed method achieves better performance than the widely used full-reference stereoscopic image quality assessment method PSNR in assessing quality of stereoscopic images compressed with JPEG and JPEG2000.     

On Stereo Viewing of SAR Images

The interpretability of side-looking radar images can be significantly enhanced by the use of overlapping image strips viewed stereoscopically. Although the subject has been studied for many years, the lack of systematically acquired data has meant that the optimum sensor geometry for good stereo viewing and mapping accuracy is still undetermined. This paper attempts to evaluate stereo viewability using available real images and describes on-going work utilizing digital elevation maps and computer image simulation.     

An information fidelity criterion for image quality assessment using natural scene statistics.

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. Traditionally, image QA algorithms interpret image quality as fidelity or similarity with a "reference" or "perfecft" image in some perceptual space. Such "full-referenc" QA methods attempt to achieve consistency in quality prediction by modeling salient physiological and psychovisual features of the human visual system (HVS), or by arbitrary signal fidelity criteria. In this paper, we approach the problem of image QA by proposing a novel information fidelity criterion that is based on natural scene statistics. QA systems are invariably involved with judging the visual quality of images and videos that are meant for "human consumption." Researchers have developed sophisticated models to capture the statistics of natural signals, that is, pictures and videos of the visual environment. Using these statistical models in an information-theoretic setting, we derive a novel QA algorithm that provides clear advantages over the traditional approaches. In particular, it is parameterless and outperforms current methods in our testing. We validate the performance of our algorithm with an extensive subjective study involving 779 images. We also show that, although our approach distinctly departs from traditional HVS-based methods, it is functionally similar to them under certain conditions, yet it outperforms them due to improved modeling. The code and the data from the subjective study are available at.     

基于视差空间图的立体图像质量客观评价方法

立体图像质量评价是评价立体视频系统性能的有 效途径,而如何利用人类视觉特性对立体图像质量 进行有效评价是目前的研究难点。本文提出了一种基于视差空间图(DSI) 的立体图像质量客观评价方法。首先, 分别构造原始立体图像和失真立体图像的DSI图;然后,通过三维离散余弦变换(3D-DCT)提取出反映图像质量 和深度感知的特征信息,并采用主成分分析(PCA)进行特征降维,形成立体图像特征信息; 最后,通过支持向量 回归(SVR)建立立体图像特征与主观评价值的关系,从而预测得到立体图像质量的客观评价 值。实验表明, 对于对称立体图像库,Pearson线性相关系数(PLCC)和Spe arman等级相关系数(SROCC)值均达到0.94以上;对于非 对称立体图像库,PLCC和SROCC值分别达到0.94以上。结果表明,本文方法能够很好地预测人眼对立体图像的主观感 知。     

No-reference image quality assessment using structural activity

Presuming that human visual perception is highly sensitive to the structural information in a scene, we propose the concept of structural activity (SA) together with a model of SA indicator in a new framework for no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (QA) in this study. The proposed framework estimates image quality based on the quantification of the SA information of different visual significance. We propose some alternative implementations of SA indicator in this paper as examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of the SA-motivated framework. Comprehensive testing demonstrates that the model of SA indicator exhibits satisfactory performance in comparison with subjective quality scores as well as representative full-reference (FR) image quality measures.     

Perceptually optimized blind repair of natural images

We define the new idea of blind image repair as a process of correcting one or more different and unknown types of distortions afflicting an image. These distortions could introduce linear or non-linear degradations, compression artifacts, noise, etc., or combinations of these. Thus the concept encompasses denoising, deblurring, deblocking, deringing, and other post-acquisition image improvement processes that address distortions. The problem is distortion-blind when the natures of the distortion processes are unknown prior to analyzing the image. Towards solving this problem, we describe a new framework for repairing an image that has undergone an unknown set of distortions, based on identifying the distortion(s) present in the image (if any) and applying possibly multiple distortion-specific image repair algorithms. Our philosophy is based on the principle that the task of general purpose image repair is one of agglomeration, i.e., the algorithm should embody multiple high-performing distortion-specific repair modules such that seamless general purpose image repair is achieved. Our proposed framework – the GEneral-purpose No-reference Image Improver (GENII) – enables the design of algorithms that are blind to distortion type as well as to distortion parameters, and only requires as input the distorted image to be repaired. The GENII framework is modular and easily extensible to image repair problems beyond those considered here. GENII operates by using natural scene statistic models to identify distortion, to perceptually optimize the distortion parameter(s), to assess the quality of the intermediate repaired images, and to perceptually optimize the repair processes. We explain the general purpose image repair framework and one specific realization, dubbed GENII-1, which assumes that the image has been affected by one or more of four possible distortion types.The performance of GENII-1 is evaluated on 4000 distorted images, and shown to deliver substantial improvements in both quantitative and qualitative visual quality.     

基于双目能量响应的无参考立体图像质量评价

为了实现对不同失真类型立体图像的质量评价,提出了一种基于双目能量响应的无参考立体图像质量评价(NR-IAQ)方法。首先,通过对各失真图像进行Gabor滤波,提取出不同频率、不同方向、不同视差响应下的局部特征矢量,作为立体图像特征信息;然后,利用支持向量回归(SVR)建立立体图像特征与主观评价值的关系,从而预测得到立体图像质量的客观评价值。实验结果表明,对于NBU-3D测试库,Pearson线性相关系数值在0.92以上,Spearman等级相关系数值在0.93以上;对于LIVE-3D测试库,Pearson线性相关系数值在0.96以上,Spearman等级相关系数值在0.96以上;与现有的全参考(FR)和(NR)质量评价方法相比,本方法得到的客观评价值与主观评价结果有较好的相关性,更加符合人眼视觉系统。     

Blind S3D image quality prediction using classical and non-classical receptive field models

We develop a novel no-reference image quality assessment model for stereoscopic 3D (S3D) images that is inspired by functional receptive field models of perceptual mechanisms in primary visual cortex (V1). The approach is called the Blind S3D Integrated Quality Evaluator (BSIQE). BSIQE simulates monocular and binocular responses to stereo views using channel separation and weighted multi-channel combination models. Binocular responses are modeled as the fusion of the two channels using a weighted multi-channel combination. The responses to stereoscopic image content of both classical and non-classical anisotropic receptive fields are then modeled based on a determination of the relative importance of the receptive field responses. In the last stage of feature extraction, we deploy a simple and efficient way of decorrelating the picture data. We extract local binary pattern (LBP) statistical features from the computed receptive field responses, and use them to train a regressor to predict the perceptual quality of stereoscopic images. We carefully evaluate BSIQE on four public-domain 3D image quality databases, and find that it is statistically superior to all compared 2D and 3D IQA algorithms. BSIQE exhibits good performance across the datasets suggesting that it is general, and it has relatively low complexity.     

基于稀疏表示的立体图像客观质量评价方法

提出了一种基于稀疏表示的立体图像质量评价方法 ,分为训练和测试两个部分。在训练部 分,通过训练不同频带的立体图像获得立体图像的稀疏字典;在测试部分,根据稀疏字典计 算得到立体图 像的稀疏特征,定义了稀疏特征相似度衡量原始和失真图像信息的差异,并根据稀疏字典计 算了频带增益和左右视点的融合权值,最后融合稀疏特征相似度作为立体图像质量的 客观评价值。在立体图像测试库上的实验结果表明,本文方法的评价结果与主观评价结果有 较好的相关性,符合人类视觉系统的感知。     

Kurtosis-based no-reference quality assessment of JPEG2000 images

No-reference (NR) image quality assessment (QA) presumes no prior knowledge of reference (distortion-free) images and seeks to quantitatively predict visual quality solely from the distorted images. We develop kurtosis-based NR quality measures for JPEG2000 compressed images in this paper. The proposed measures are based on either 1-D or 2-D kurtosis in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain of general image blocks. Comprehensive testing demonstrates their good consistency with subjective quality scores as well as satisfactory performance in comparison with both the representative full-reference (FR) and state-of-the-art NR image quality measures.     

No-reference Stereoscopic Image Quality Assessment Using Binocular Self-similarity and Deep Neural Network

Quality assessment of three-dimensional (3D) images is more challenging than that of 2D images. The quality of 3D visual experience is one of the most challenging areas of human binocular perception and is affected by multiple factors such as asymmetric stereo image/video compression, depth perception, visual discomfort, and single view quality. In this paper, we propose a new no-reference quality assessment method for stereoscopic images based on Binocular Self-similarity (BS) and Deep Neural Networks (DNN). To be more specific, a BS index is defined and computed according to binocular rivalry and suppression based on the depth image-based rendering technique. Then, a DNN is trained in an opinion unaware way to predict local quality. Binocular integration (BI) index is calculated by using the trained DNN, accounting for binocular integration behaviors. Finally, the final quality score of stereoscopic image is obtained by combining the BS and BI indexes together. Experimental results on four public 3D image quality assessment databases demonstrate that compared with existing methods, the proposed method can achieve high consistency with subjective perception on stereoscopic images with both symmetric and asymmetric distortions.     

基于支持向量回归的立体图像客观质量评价模型

立体图像质量评价是评价立体视频系统性能的有效途径,而如何利用人类视觉特性对立体图像质量进行有效评价是目前的研究难点。该文根据图像奇异值有较强稳定性的特点,结合立体图像的主观视觉特性,提出了一种基于支持向量回归(Support Vector Regression, SVR)的立体图像客观质量评价模型。该模型通过分析立体图像的视觉特性,提取左右图像的奇异值作为立体图像的特征信息,然后根据立体图像的不同失真类型情况对其特征进行融合,通过SVR预测得到立体图像质量的客观评价值。实验结果表明,采用该文提出的客观评价模型对立体数据测试库进行评价,Pearson线性相关系数值在0.93以上,Spearman等级相关系数值在0.94以上,均方根误差值接近6,异常值比率值为0.00%,符合人眼视觉特性,能够很好地预测人眼对立体图像的主观感知。     

基于三维感知的立体虚拟视点图像质量评价方法

为了评价立体虚拟视点图像的质量,提出了一种基 于三维感知的客观评价方法。综合考虑了立体虚拟视点图像两大最主要失真类型:单视点绘 制失真和立体视点不匹配失真。针对单视点绘制失真,先提取 当前视点失真图与无失真图的差异性区域,再针对该差异性区域计算平均结构相似度(MSSIM ),最后将左 右视点平均池化作为单目纹理特征值;针对立体视点不匹配失真,先对左右视点失真图分别 进行视差映射, 再提取映射图与该视点失真图的差异区域作为双目不匹配区域,然后针对不匹配区域计算MS SIM 值,最 后将左右视点平均池化作为双目竞争特征值;最终将两个特征值幂次融合,作为最终的立体 虚拟视点图像 质量评价客观指标。实验结果表明本方法有效匹配主观打分的DMOS值,皮尔森线性相关系数 和斯皮尔曼 秩相关系数分别为0.911和0.900,正确反映了 立体虚拟视点图像质量。     

Stereoscopic image quality assessment considering visual mechanism and multi-loss constraints

In this paper, a convolutional neural network (CNN) with multi-loss constraints is designed for stereoscopic image quality assessment (SIQA). A stereoscopic image not only contains monocular information, but also provides binocular information which is as identically crucial as the former. So we take the image patches of left-view images, right-view images and the difference images as the inputs of the network to utilize monocular information and binocular information. Moreover, we propose a method to obtain proxy label of each image patch. It preserves the quality difference between different regions and views. In addition, the multiple loss functions with adaptive loss weights are introduced in the network, which consider both local features and global features and constrain the feature learning from multiple perspectives. And the adaptive loss weights also make the multi-loss CNN more flexible. The experimental results on four public SIQA databases show that the proposed method is superior to other existing SIQA methods with state-of-the-art performance.     

基于三维结构张量的立体图像质量客观评价方法

根据梯度结构张量能够表示图像结构信息的特点, 提出了一种基于三维结构张 量的立体图像客观质量评价方法。首先分别求取原始和失真的立体图像水平、垂直和 视点方向的梯度信息,以及敏感区域,并构造出立体图像中每个像素的三维结构张量矩 阵;然后,提 取三维结构张量矩阵的特征值和特征向量信息;最后,根据特征值和特征向量预测得到立体 图像质量的客 观评价值。实验结果表明,采用本文提出的客观评价方法对立体图像测试库进行评价,总体 评价的Pearson 线性相关系数(PLCC)和Spearman等级相关系数(SROCC)值均在0.92左右,Kendall相关系数 (KROCC)值 接近0.80,均方根误差(RMSE)值均在6.00左右;与其他方法相 比,本方法具有较高的预测精确性。