• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.448-463
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• 2017

Multimedia is a ubiquitous and indispensable part of our daily life and learning such as audio, image, and video. Objective and subjective quality evaluations play an important role in various multimedia applications. Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) is used to indicate the perceptual quality of a distorted image, while its reference image is not considered and used. Blur is one of the common image distortions. In this paper, we propose a novel BIQA index for Gaussian blur distortion based on the fact that images with different blur degree will have different changes through the same blur. We describe this discrimination from three aspects: color, edge, and structure. For color, we adopt color histogram; for edge, we use edge intensity map, and saliency map is used as the weighting function to be consistent with human visual system (HVS); for structure, we use structure tensor and structural similarity (SSIM) index. Numerous experiments based on four benchmark databases show that our proposed index is highly consistent with the subjective quality assessment.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.631-643
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• 2016

Due to the block-based discrete cosine transform (BDCT), JPEG compressed images usually exhibit blocking artifacts. When the bit rates are very low, blocking artifacts will seriously affect the image's visual quality. A bilateral filter has the features for edge-preserving when it smooths images, so we propose an adaptive-weighted bilateral filter based on the features. In this paper, an image-deblocking scheme using this kind of adaptive-weighted bilateral filter is proposed to remove and reduce blocking artifacts. Two parameters of the proposed adaptive-weighted bilateral filter are adaptive-weighted so that it can avoid over-blurring unsmooth regions while eliminating blocking artifacts in smooth regions. This is achieved in two aspects: by using local entropy to control the level of filtering of each single pixel point within the image, and by using an improved blind image quality assessment (BIQA) to control the strength of filtering different images whose blocking artifacts are different. It is proved by our experimental results that our proposed image-deblocking scheme provides good performance on eliminating blocking artifacts and can avoid the over-blurring of unsmooth regions.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.11
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• pp.4043-4064
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• 2021

Night-time image quality evaluation is an urgent requirement in visual inspection. The lighting environment of night-time results in low brightness, low contrast, loss of detailed information, and colour dissonance of image, which remains a daunting task of delicately evaluating the image quality at night. A new blind quality assessment metric is presented for realistic night-time scenario through a comprehensive consideration of contrast, texture, and colour in this article. To be specific, image blocks' color-gray-difference (CGD) histogram that represents contrast features is computed at first. Next, texture features that are measured by the mean subtracted contrast normalized (MSCN)-weighted local binary pattern (LBP) histogram are calculated. Then statistical features in Lαβ colour space are detected. Finally, the quality prediction model is conducted by the support vector regression (SVR) based on extracted contrast, texture, and colour features. Experiments conducted on NNID, CCRIQ, LIVE-CH, and CID2013 databases indicate that the proposed metric is superior to the compared BIQA metrics.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.7
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• pp.3245-3271
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• 2016

To obtain well-dehazed images at the receiver while sustaining low bit rates in the transmission pipeline, this paper investigates the effects of image dehazing methods using dehazing contrast-enhancement filters on image compression for surveillance systems. At first, this paper proposes a novel image dehazing method by using a new method of calculating the transmission function—namely, the direct denoising method. Next, we deduce the dehazing effects of the direct denoising method and image dehazing method based on dark channel prior (DCP) on image compression in terms of ringing artifacts and blocking artifacts. It can be concluded that the direct denoising method performs better than the DCP method for decompressed (reconstructed) images. We also improve the direct denoising method to obtain more desirable dehazed images with higher contrast, using the saliency map as the guidance image to modify the transmission function. Finally, we adjust the parameters of dehazing contrast-enhancement filters to obtain a corresponding composite peak signal-to-noise ratio (CPSNR) and blind image quality assessment (BIQA) of the decompressed images. Experimental results show that different filters have different effects on image compression. Moreover, our proposed dehazing method can strike a balance between image dehazing and image compression.