Evaluation of Region-of-Interest coders using perceptual image quality assessments

A perceptual measure emulates the human vision for image quality assessment. This paper illustrates the evaluation of Region-of-Interest (ROI) coders using perceptual image quality assessments. The goal of this evaluation is to characterize the coder performance by controlling the ROI quality. Perceptual measures are taken into account for evaluation since they behave as a human-made evaluation. Moreover, a perceptual assessment named Wavelet Quality Index (WQI), is introduced as another image coder evaluator. Proposed assessment aims at emulating the human vision by a weighted linear combination of three wavelet-based perceptual measures. We evaluate the following types of ROI-coders: those preserving the quality of ROI by coarse compression of background (Max-Shift coder), and those balancing the quality between ROI and background (SCM-Shift, and BbB-Shift coders). Using considered assessments for the performance evaluation of coders, results show a variation of evaluation by nature of measurement.     

Image compression with adaptive local cosines: a comparative study

The goal of this work is twofold. First, we demonstrate that an advantage can be gained by using local cosine bases over wavelets to encode images that contain periodic textures. We designed a coder that outperforms one of the best wavelet coders on a large number of images. The coder finds the optimal segmentation of the image in terms of local cosine bases. The coefficients are encoded using a scalar quantizer optimized for Laplacian distributions. This new coder constitutes the first concrete contribution of the paper. Second, we used our coder to perform an extensive comparison of several optimized bells in terms of rate-distortion and visual quality for a large collection of images. This study provides for the first time a rigorous evaluation in realistic conditions of these bells. Our experiments show that bells that are designed to reproduce exactly polynomials of degree 1 resulted in the worst performance in terms of the PSNR. However, a visual inspection of the compressed images indicates that these bells often provide reconstructed images with very few visual artifacts, even at low bit rates. The bell with the most narrow Fourier transform gave the best results in terms of the PSNR on most images. This bell tends however to create annoying visual artifacts in very smooth regions at low bit rate.     

Curved wavelet transform for image coding.

The conventional two-dimensional wavelet transform used in existing image coders is usually performed through one-dimensional (1-D) filtering in the vertical and horizontal directions, which cannot efficiently represent edges and lines in images. The curved wavelet transform presented in this paper is carried out by applying 1-D filters along curves, rather than being restricted to vertical and horizontal straight lines. The curves are determined based on image content and are usually parallel to edges and lines in the image to be coded. The pixels along these curves can be well represented by a small number of wavelet coefficients. The curved wavelet transform is used to construct a new image coder. The code-stream syntax of the new coder is the same as that of JPEG2000, except that a new marker segment is added to the tile headers. Results of image coding and subjective quality assessment show that the new image coder performs better than, or as well as, JPEG2000. It is particularly efficient for images that contain sharp edges and can provide a PSNR gain of up to 1.67 dB for natural images compared with JPEG2000.     

Restoration of lossy compressed noisy images

Noise degrades the performance of any image compression algorithm. However, at very low bit rates, image coders effectively filter noise that may he present in the image, thus, enabling the coder to operate closer to the noise free case. Unfortunately, at these low bit rates the quality of the compressed image is reduced and very distinctive coding artifacts occur. This paper proposes a combined restoration of the compressed image from both the artifacts introduced by the coder along with the additive noise. The proposed approach is applied to images corrupted by data-dependent Poisson noise and to images corrupted by film-grain noise when compressed using a block transform-coder such as JPEG. This approach has proved to be effective in terms of visual quality and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) when tested on simulated and real images.     

Quality measurement and use of pre-processing in image compression

Traditional quality measures for image coding, such as the peak signal-to-noise ratio, assume that the preservation of the original image is the desired goal. However, pre-processing images prior to encoding, designed to remove noise or unimportant detail, can improve the overall performance of an image coder. Objective image quality metrics obtained from the difference between the original and coded images cannot properly assess this improved performance. This paper proposes a new methodology for quality metrics that differentially weighs the changes in the image due to pre-processing and encoding. These new quality measures establish the value of pre-processing for image coding and quantitatively determine the performance improvement that can be thus achieved by JPEG and wavelet coders.     

Unsupervised image classification, segmentation, and enhancementusing ICA mixture models

An unsupervised classification algorithm is derived by modeling observed data as a mixture of several mutually exclusive classes that are each described by linear combinations of independent, non-Gaussian densities. The algorithm estimates the data density in each class by using parametric nonlinear functions that fit to the non-Gaussian structure of the data. This improves classification accuracy compared with standard Gaussian mixture models. When applied to images, the algorithm can learn efficient codes (basis functions) for images that capture the statistically significant structure intrinsic in the images. We apply this technique to the problem of unsupervised classification, segmentation, and denoising of images. We demonstrate that this method was effective in classifying complex image textures such as natural scenes and text. It was also useful for denoising and filling in missing pixels in images with complex structures. The advantage of this model is that image codes can be learned with increasing numbers of classes thus providing greater flexibility in modeling structure and in finding more image features than in either Gaussian mixture models or standard independent component analysis (ICA) algorithms.     

Tree coding of bilevel images

Presently, sequential tree coders are the best general purpose bilevel image coders and the best coders of halftoned images. The current ISO standard, Joint Bilevel Image Experts Group (JBIG), is a good example. A sequential tree coder encodes the data by feeding estimates of conditional probabilities to an arithmetic coder. The conditional probabilities are estimated from co-occurrence statistics of past pixels, the statistics are stored in a tree. By organizing the code length calculations properly, a vast number of possible models (trees) reflecting different pixel orderings can be investigated within reasonable time prior to generating the code. A number of general-purpose coders are constructed according to this principle. Rissanen's (1989) one-pass algorithm, context, is presented in two modified versions. The baseline is proven to be a universal coder. The faster version, which is one order of magnitude slower than JBIG, obtains excellent and highly robust compression performance. A multipass free tree coding scheme produces superior compression results for all test images. A multipass free template coding scheme produces significantly better results than JBIG for difficult images such as halftones. By utilizing randomized subsampling in the template selection, the speed becomes acceptable for practical image coding     

Performance improvement of the SPIHT coder

The set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) coder is one of the state-of-the-art coders among the wavelet-based image compression coders. For improving the performance of the SPIHT coder, in this paper, we propose a pre-processing method that applies the discrete sine transform or the discrete cosine transform to the wavelet coefficients in the highest frequency subbands and in the next highest frequency subbands before the SPIHT encoding. Experimental results show that the proposed method increases the peak signal to noise ratio by up to 0.4 (dB) in textured images over the original SPIHT coder.     

Image coding by block prediction of multiresolution subimages

The redundancy of the multiresolution representation has been clearly demonstrated in the case of fractal images, but it has not been fully recognized and exploited for general images. Fractal block coders have exploited the self-similarity among blocks in images. We devise an image coder in which the causal similarity among blocks of different subbands in a multiresolution decomposition of the image is exploited. In a pyramid subband decomposition, the image is decomposed into a set of subbands that are localized in scale, orientation, and space. The proposed coding scheme consists of predicting blocks in one subimage from blocks in lower resolution subbands with the same orientation. Although our prediction maps are of the same kind of those used in fractal block coders, which are based on an iterative mapping scheme, our coding technique does not impose any contractivity constraint on the block maps. This makes the decoding procedure very simple and allows a direct evaluation of the mean squared error (MSE) between the original and the reconstructed image at coding time. More importantly, we show that the subband pyramid acts as an automatic block classifier, thus making the block search simpler and the block matching more effective. These advantages are confirmed by the experimental results, which show that the performance of our scheme is superior for both visual quality and MSE to that obtainable with standard fractal block coders and also to that of other popular image coders such as JPEG.     

Image compression via joint statistical characterization in thewavelet domain

We develop a probability model for natural images, based on empirical observation of their statistics in the wavelet transform domain. Pairs of wavelet coefficients, corresponding to basis functions at adjacent spatial locations, orientations, and scales, are found to be non-Gaussian in both their marginal and joint statistical properties. Specifically, their marginals are heavy-tailed, and although they are typically decorrelated, their magnitudes are highly correlated. We propose a Markov model that explains these dependencies using a linear predictor for magnitude coupled with both multiplicative and additive uncertainties, and show that it accounts for the statistics of a wide variety of images including photographic images, graphical images, and medical images. In order to directly demonstrate the power of the model, we construct an image coder called EPWIC (embedded predictive wavelet image coder), in which subband coefficients are encoded one bitplane at a time using a nonadaptive arithmetic encoder that utilizes conditional probabilities calculated from the model. Bitplanes are ordered using a greedy algorithm that considers the MSE reduction per encoded bit. The decoder uses the statistical model to predict coefficient values based on the bits it has received. Despite the simplicity of the model, the rate-distortion performance of the coder is roughly comparable to the best image coders in the literature.     

A generalized Lloyd-type algorithm for adaptive transform coder design

In this paper, we establish a probabilistic framework for adaptive transform coding that leads to a generalized Lloyd type algorithm for transform coder design. Transform coders are often constructed by concatenating an ad hoc choice of transform with suboptimal bit allocation and quantizer design. Instead, we start from a probabilistic latent variable model in the form of a mixture of constrained Gaussian mixtures. From this model, we derive an transform coder design algorithm, which integrates optimization of all transform coder parameters. An essential part this algorithm is our introduction of a new transform basis-the coding optimal transform-which, unlike commonly used transforms, minimizes compression distortion. Adaptive transform coders can be effective for compressing databases of related imagery since the high overhead associated with these coders can be amortized over the entire database. For this work, we performed compression experiments on a database of synthetic aperture radar images. Our results show that adaptive coders improve compressed signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by approximately 0.5 dB compared with global coders. Coders that incorporated the coding optimal transform had the best SNRs on the images used to develop the coder. However, coders that incorporated the discrete cosine transform generalized better to new images.     

A wavelet-based analysis of fractal image compression

Why does fractal image compression work? What is the implicit image model underlying fractal block coding? How can we characterize the types of images for which fractal block coders will work well? These are the central issues we address. We introduce a new wavelet-based framework for analyzing block-based fractal compression schemes. Within this framework we are able to draw upon insights from the well-established transform coder paradigm in order to address the issue of why fractal block coders work. We show that fractal block coders of the form introduced by Jacquin (1992) are Haar wavelet subtree quantization schemes. We examine a generalization of the schemes to smooth wavelets with additional vanishing moments. The performance of our generalized coder is comparable to the best results in the literature for a Jacquin-style coding scheme. Our wavelet framework gives new insight into the convergence properties of fractal block coders, and it leads us to develop an unconditionally convergent scheme with a fast decoding algorithm. Our experiments with this new algorithm indicate that fractal coders derive much of their effectiveness from their ability to efficiently represent wavelet zero trees. Finally, our framework reveals some of the fundamental limitations of current fractal compression schemes.     

Dilation-run wavelet image coding

The run-length coding and the morphological representation are two classical schemes for wavelet image coding. The run-length coders have the advantage of simplicity by recording the lengths of zero-runs between significant wavelet coefficients but at the expense of yielding an inferior rate-distortion performance. The morphology-based coders, on the other hand, utilize the morphological dilation operation to delineate the clusters of significant coefficients for improving coding performance. In this paper, a novel dilation-run image coding algorithm is developed by taking the advantages of both schemes, in which the clustered significant coefficients are extracted by using the morphological dilation operation and the insignificant coefficients between the extracted clusters are coded by using the run-length coding method. The proposed dilation-run image coder is implemented in the framework of bitplane coding for producing embedded bitstreams. Compared with several state-of-the-art wavelet image coding methods, the proposed dilation-run image coding method achieves comparable rate-distortion coding performance, especially more attractive for fingerprint type of imageries.     

一种Enlighten-GAN网络的指纹超分辨率重建方法北大核心CSCD

将低分辨率(LR)图像重建为高分辨率(HR)图像的主流模型是生成对抗网络(GAN)。然而,由于基于GAN的方法利用从其他图像中学习到的内容来恢复高频信息,在处理新的图像时往往会产生伪影。由于,指纹图像的特征比自然图像更加复杂。因此,将以前的网络应用于指纹图像,尤其是中等分辨率的图像,会导致收敛不稳定伪影效果更加严重。针对以上弊端,本文提出了一种Enlighten-GAN超分辨率方法,来解决指纹图像的重建问题。具体来说,我们设计了启发块来控制网络收敛到一个可靠的点,并利用自我监督分层感知损失以改进损失函数提升网络性能。实验结果证明Enlighten-GAN方法在指纹图像的重建效果性能上具有更加卓越的效果。     

Rate-Distortion Coding Simulation for Color Images

We propose a distortion measure for color images, based on a mathematical model of color vision, and supported by subjective image quality evaluations. The visual model is configured after a simplified schematic of the retina's physiology and it transforms the red, green and blue image components into a representation that is consistent with major psychophysical phenomena. The distortion criterion proposed consists of measuring the mean square error in the above representation space. Consistency of the measure with human quality judgment is supported by a subjective ranking experiment, using images distorted in various ways by addition of noise. An optimal coder (in the rate distortion sense) is also simulated, which minimizes the distortion measured as proposed. The resulting image provides a quality standard at the rate distortion bound, against which actual coders can be compared. Finally it is observed that from a statistical point of view, the model's output is a near ideal color image representation for efficient coding.     

Still image/video frame lossy compression providing a desired visual quality

The problem of how to automatically provide a desired (required) visual quality in lossy compression of still images and video frames is considered in this paper. The quality can be measured based on different conventional and visual quality metrics. In this paper, we mainly employ human visual system (HVS) based metrics PSNR-HVS-M and MSSIM since both of them take into account several important peculiarities of HVS. To provide a desired visual quality with high accuracy, iterative image compression procedures are proposed and analyzed. An experimental study is performed for a large number of grayscale test images. We demonstrate that there exist several coders for which the number of iterations can be essentially decreased using a reasonable selection of the starting value and the variation interval for the parameter controlling compression (PCC). PCC values attained at the end of the iterative procedure may heavily depend upon the coder used and the complexity of the image. Similarly, the compression ratio also considerably depends on the above factors. We show that for some modern coders that take HVS into consideration it is possible to give practical recommendations on setting a fixed PCC to provide a desired visual quality in a non-iterative manner. The case when original images are corrupted by visible noise is also briefly studied.     

New directions in subband coding

Two very different subband coders are described. The first is a modified dynamic bit-allocation-subband coder (D-SBC) designed for variable rate coding situations and easily adaptable to noisy channel environments. It can operate at rates as low as 12 kb/s and still give good quality speech. The second coder is a 16-kb/s waveform coder, based on a combination of subband coding and vector quantization (VQ-SBC). The key feature of this coder is its short coding delay, which makes it suitable for real-time communication networks. The speech quality of both coders has been enhanced by adaptive postfiltering. The coders have been implemented on a single AT&T DSP32 signal processor     

Lossy compression of noisy images

Noise degrades the performance of any image compression algorithm. This paper studies the effect of noise on lossy image compression. The effect of Gaussian, Poisson, and film-grain noise on compression is studied. To reduce the effect of the noise on compression, the distortion is measured with respect to the original image not to the input of the coder. Results of noisy source coding are then used to design the optimal coder. In the minimum-mean-square-error (MMSE) sense, this is equivalent to an MMSE estimator followed by an MMSE coder. The coders for the Poisson noise and the film-grain noise cases are derived and their performance is studied. The effect of this preprocessing step is studied using standard coders, e.g., JPEG, also. As is demonstrated, higher quality is achieved at lower bit rates.     

Adaptive wavelet packet basis selection for zerotree image coding

Image coding methods based on adaptive wavelet transforms and those employing zerotree quantization have been shown to be successful. We present a general zerotree structure for an arbitrary wavelet packet geometry in an image coding framework. A fast basis selection algorithm is developed; it uses a Markov chain based cost estimate of encoding the image using this structure. As a result, our adaptive wavelet zerotree image coder has a relatively low computational complexity, performs comparably to state-of-the-art image coders, and is capable of progressively encoding images.     

A Comparison of Digital Speech Coding Methods for Mobile Radio Systems

Subjective quality measurements on three digital speech coders, simulated with mobile radio channel transmission, were performed using the "mean opinion score (MOS)" method. The three speech coding methods tested were: continuously variable slope deltamodulation (CVSD) coding, adaptive predictive coding (APC), and residually excited linear predictive (RELP) coding. Several versions of each coder, with transmission rates in the range of 7.3 to 16.1 kbits/s, were simulated. Five different channel conditions, including three derived from land mobile radio field experiments, were applied to the speech coders' encoded output to study the effects. The results show that of the three coders, the CVSD coder is the most robust to channel errors, but produces reconstructed output speech of unacceptable quality. The 14.4 kbit/s RELP coder produces relatively good Output speech quality, exhibits a mild degree of robustness to mobile radio channel errors, and is slightly less complex than the APC coder. Of the three digital speech coders tested, the RELP coder appears the most suitable for use with land mobile radio. However none of the three coders was able to produce speech of telephone toll quality in a mobile radio environment.