Perceptual vision models for picture quality assessment and compression applications
Wilfried M. Osberger · 1999
To my family The rapid increase in the use of compressed digital images has created a strong need for the development of objective picture quality metrics. No objective met-rics have yet been demonstrated to work accurately over a wide range of scenes, coders, and bit-rates. Promising results have been achieved by metrics which model the operation of early stages of the human visual system. However, these models have generally been calibrated using simple visual stimuli, and have not considered any higher level or cognitive processes which are known to in uence human perception of image quality. In this thesis, a new picture quality metric is proposed which models both early vision and higher level attention processes. The early vision model simulates the operation of neurons in the primary visual cortex. The general structure of this model is similar to other models of early visual processes. However, the model's components have been designed and calibrated specically for operation with