Reduced-Reference Quality Assessment of Point Clouds via Content-Oriented Saliency Projection

Many dense 3D point clouds have been exploited to represent visual objects instead of traditional images or videos. To evaluate the perceptual quality of various point clouds, in this letter, we propose a novel and efficient Reduced-Reference quality metric for point clouds, which is based on Content-oriented sAliency Projection (RR-CAP). Specifically, we make the first attempt to simplify reference and distorted point clouds into projected saliency maps with a downsampling operation. Through this process, we tackle the issue of transmitting large-volume original point clouds to user-ends for quality assessment. Then, motivated by the characteristics of the human visual system (HVS), the objective quality scores of distorted point clouds are produced by combining content-oriented similarity and statistical correlation measurements. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted on SJTU-PCQA and WPC databases. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms existing reduced-reference and no-reference quality metrics, and significantly reduces the performance gap between state-of-the-art full-reference quality assessment methods. In addition, we show the performance variation of each proposed technical component by ablation tests.

Dehazed Image Quality Evaluation: From Partial Discrepancy to Blind Perception

Image dehazing aims to restore spatial details from hazy images. There have emerged a number of image dehazing algorithms, designed to increase the visibility of those hazy images. However, much less work has been focused on evaluating the visual quality of dehazed images. In this paper, we propose a Reduced-Reference dehazed image quality evaluation approach based on Partial Discrepancy (RRPD) and then extend it to a No-Reference quality assessment metric with Blind Perception (NRBP). Specifically, inspired by the hierarchical characteristics of the human perceiving dehazed images, we introduce three groups of features: luminance discrimination, color appearance, and overall naturalness. In the proposed RRPD, the combined distance between a set of sender and receiver features is adopted to quantify the perceptually dehazed image quality. By integrating global and local channels from dehazed images, the RRPD is converted to NRBP which does not rely on any information from the references. Extensive experiment results on several dehazed image quality databases demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art full-reference, reduced-reference, and no-reference quality assessment models. Furthermore, we show that the proposed dehazed image quality evaluation methods can be effectively applied to tune parameters for potential image dehazing algorithms.

Going the Extra Mile in Face Image Quality Assessment: A Novel Database and Model

Computer vision models for image quality assessment (IQA) predict the subjective effect of generic image degradation, such as artefacts, blurs, bad exposure, or colors. The scarcity of face images in existing IQA datasets (below 10\%) is limiting the precision of IQA required for accurately filtering low-quality face images or guiding CV models for face image processing, such as super-resolution, image enhancement, and generation. In this paper, we first introduce the largest annotated IQA database to date that contains 20,000 human faces (an order of magnitude larger than all existing rated datasets of faces), of diverse individuals, in highly varied circumstances, quality levels, and distortion types. Based on the database, we further propose a novel deep learning model, which re-purposes generative prior features for predicting subjective face quality. By exploiting rich statistics encoded in well-trained generative models, we obtain generative prior information of the images and serve them as latent references to facilitate the blind IQA task. Experimental results demonstrate the superior prediction accuracy of the proposed model on the face IQA task.

TranSalNet: Visual saliency prediction using transformers

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have significantly advanced computational modeling for saliency prediction. However, the inherent inductive biases of convolutional architectures cause insufficient long-range contextual encoding capacity, which potentially makes a saliency model less humanlike. Transformers have shown great potential in encoding long-range information by leveraging the self-attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel saliency model integrating transformer components to CNNs to capture the long-range contextual information. Experimental results show that the new components make improvements, and the proposed model achieves promising results in predicting saliency.

Cuid: A new study of perceived image quality and its subjective assessment

Research on image quality assessment (IQA) remains limited mainly due to our incomplete knowledge about human visual perception. Existing IQA algorithms have been designed or trained with insufficient subjective data with a small degree of stimulus variability. This has led to challenges for those algorithms to handle complexity and diversity of real-world digital content. Perceptual evidence from human subjects serves as a grounding for the development of advanced IQA algorithms. It is thus critical to acquire reliable subjective data with controlled perception experiments that faithfully reflect human behavioural responses to distortions in visual signals. In this paper, we present a new study of image quality perception where subjective ratings were collected in a controlled lab environment. We investigate how quality perception is affected by a combination of different categories of images and different types and levels of distortions. The database will be made publicly available to facilitate calibration and validation of IQA algorithms.

A Comparative Study of Algorithms for Realtime Panoramic Video Blending

Unlike image blending algorithms, video blending algorithms have been little studied. In this paper, we investigate 6 popular blending algorithms---feather blending, multi-band blending, modified Poisson blending, mean value coordinate blending, multi-spline blending and convolution pyramid blending. We consider in particular realtime panoramic video blending, a key problem in various virtual reality tasks. To evaluate the performance of the 6 algorithms on this problem, we have created a video benchmark of several videos captured under various conditions. We analyze the time and memory needed by the above 6 algorithms, for both CPU and GPU implementations (where readily parallelizable). The visual quality provided by these algorithms is also evaluated both objectively and subjectively. The video benchmark and algorithm implementations are publicly available.