• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers D
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• v.52 no.7
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• pp.434-441
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• 2003

This paper proposes a new quantitative and objective image quality metric which is essential to verify the performance of block-based DCT image coding. The proposed metric considers not only global distortion of coded image such as spatial frequency sensitivity and channel masking using HVS based multi-channel model, but also structural distortions caused block-based coding. The experimental results show a strong correlation between proposed metric and subjective metric.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers C
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• v.52 no.7
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• pp.434-434
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• 2003

This paper proposes a new quantitative and objective image quality metric which is essential to verify the performance of block-based DCT image coding The proposed metric considers not only global distortion of coded image such as spatial frequency sensitivity and channel masking using HVS based multi-channel model, but also structural distortions caused block-based coding. The experimental results show a strong correlation between propose(B metric and subjective metric.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.94-104
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• 2022

Because of its convenience and compatibility with various image processing techniques, digital image representation of holograms is generally used in digital holography, and thus, quality assessment of digital holograms is an essential issue. This study proposes a new objective quality metric for digital phase hologram image processing. The proposed metric is based on a newly defined phase distortion created by taking the 2π periodicity of phase information into account. The experimental results show that the proposed metric correlates with reconstruction image quality better than the existing metric under random distortions and also works well with JPEG 2000 compression. It is expected to be broadly used in phase image processing and compression applications including phase holograms.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.57-66
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• 2017

Emotional image quality optimization methodologies are investigated using technological image quality controls based on the eye tests of various image samples. The images are evaluated based on various contrast, lightness and saturation image quality metric tone curves. The order of importance to image quality enhancements is contrast, saturation and brightness. The slopes of emotional image qualities with respect to technical image quality metric changes are found to be composed of mathematical function modelling with nearly zero, intermediate and maximum slope regions in general, which can reflect well known log and saturated as well as conventional reverse U shape natures. Image quality improvements are analyzed not only with just single but also with multiple image quality metrics. To ease the unified image quality metric analysis and control, a new function is presented to utilize both the newly found and conventional emotional image quality behaviors. It is found that the overall image quality enhancement can be realized only in a few limited cases of multiple image quality metric controls. It is also found that the kinds of image quality enhancement methodologies are not strongly dependent on image contents (genre).

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.157-168
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• 2016

In image processing and computer vision fields, mean squared error (MSE) has popularly been used as an objective metric in image quality optimization problems due to its desirable mathematical properties such as metricability, differentiability and convexity. However, as known that MSE is not highly correlated with perceived visual quality, much effort has been made to develop new image quality assessment (IQA) metrics having both the desirable mathematical properties aforementioned and high prediction performances for subjective visual quality scores. Although recent IQA metrics having the desirable mathematical properties have shown to give some promising results in prediction performance for visual quality scores, they also have high computation complexities. In order to alleviate this problem, we propose a new fast IQA metric using a simple Laplace operator. Since the Laplace operator used in our IQA metric can not only effectively mimic operations of receptive fields in retina for luminance stimulus but also be simply computed, our IQA metric can yield both very fast processing speed and high prediction performance. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed IQA metric, our method is compared to some state-of-the-art IQA metrics. The experimental results showed that the proposed IQA metric has the fastest running speed compared the IQA methods except MSE under comparison. Moreover, our IQA metric achieves the best prediction performance for subjective image quality scores among the state-of-the-art IQA metrics under test.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.288-307
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• 2016

Image distortions are typically characterized by degradations of structures. Dictionaries learned from natural images can capture the underlying structures in images, which are important for image quality assessment (IQA). This paper presents a general-purpose no-reference image quality metric using a GRadient-Induced Dictionary (GRID). A dictionary is first constructed based on gradients of natural images using K-means clustering. Then image features are extracted using the dictionary based on Euclidean-norm coding and max-pooling. A distortion classification model and several distortion-specific quality regression models are trained using the support vector machine (SVM) by combining image features with distortion types and subjective scores, respectively. To evaluate the quality of a test image, the distortion classification model is used to determine the probabilities that the image belongs to different kinds of distortions, while the regression models are used to predict the corresponding distortion-specific quality scores. Finally, an overall quality score is computed as the probability-weighted distortion-specific quality scores. The proposed metric can evaluate image quality accurately and efficiently using a small dictionary. The performance of the proposed method is verified on public image quality databases. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed metric can generate quality scores highly consistent with human perception, and it outperforms the state-of-the-arts.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.44 no.9
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• pp.992-1004
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• 2017

To assess image quality accurately, an image quality assessment (IQA) metric is required to reflect the human visual system (HVS) properly. In other words, the structure, color, and contrast ratio of the image should be evaluated in consideration of various factors. In addition, as mobile embedded devices such as smartphone become popular, a fast computing speed is important. In this paper, the proposed IQA metric combines color similarity, gradient similarity, and phase similarity synergistically to satisfy the HVS and is designed by using optimized pooling and quantization for fast computation. The proposed IQA metric is compared against existing 13 methods using 4 kinds of evaluation methods. The experimental results show that the proposed IQA metric ranks the first on 3 evaluation methods and the first on the remaining method, next to VSI which is the most remarkable IQA metric. Its computing speed is on average about 20% faster than VSI's. In addition, we find that the proposed IQA metric has a bigger amount of correlation with the HVS than existing IQA metrics.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.38 no.6
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• pp.1114-1123
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• 2016

Multi-view video plus depth (MVD) has been widely used owing to its effectiveness in three-dimensional data representation. Using MVD, color videos with only a limited number of real viewpoints are compressed and transmitted along with captured or estimated depth videos. Because the synthesized views are generated from decoded real views, their original reference views do not exist at either the transmitter or receiver. Therefore, it is challenging to define an efficient metric to evaluate the quality of synthesized images. We propose a novel metric-the reduced-reference quality metric. First, the effects of depth distortion on the quality of synthesized images are analyzed. We then employ the high correlation between the local depth distortions and local color characteristics of the decoded depth and color images, respectively, to achieve an efficient depth quality metric for each real view. Finally, the objective quality metric of the synthesized views is obtained by combining all the depth quality metrics obtained from the decoded real views. The experimental results show that the proposed quality metric correlates very well with full reference image and video quality metrics.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2009.01a
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• pp.316-320
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• 2009

In this paper, a reference-free perceptual quality metric is proposed for image assessment. It measures the amount of overall blockiness and blurring in the image. And edge-oriented artifacts, such as ringing, mosaic and staircase noise are also considered. In order to give a single quality score, the individual artifact scores are adaptively combined according to the difference between the edge-oriented artifacts and other artifacts. The quality score obtained by the proposed algorithm shows strong correlation with the MOS values by VQEG.