A New Methodology for Evaluating the Quality of High-Fidelity Compressed Images

Temel Kavramlar

This research paper introduces a novel subjective quality assessment methodology for high-fidelity compressed images, employing boosted and plain triplet comparisons to achieve a fine-grained quality scale in Just Noticeable Difference (JND) units, offering more informative results for practical applications than traditional methods.

Özet

Bibliographic Information:

Testolina, M., Jenadeleh, M., Mohammadi, S., Su, S., Ascenso, J., Ebrahimi, T., Sneyers, J., & Saupe, D. (2024). Fine-grained subjective visual quality assessment for high-fidelity compressed images. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.09501v1.

Research Objective:

This paper aims to address the limitations of traditional image quality assessment methods in evaluating high-fidelity compressed images, proposing a new methodology for fine-grained quality assessment using JND units.

Methodology:

The researchers developed two subjective quality assessment methods: Boosted Triplet Comparison (BTC) and Plain Triplet Comparison (PTC). BTC utilizes boosting techniques like zooming, artifact amplification, and flicker to enhance the visibility of subtle compression artifacts. PTC presents original and compressed images side-by-side, allowing observers to toggle between them. A large-scale crowdsourcing study was conducted using Amazon Mechanical Turk to collect subjective responses on image triplets. The collected data was analyzed using Thurstonian Case V model and rescaled using non-linear regression to align boosted and plain quality scales.

Key Findings:

The proposed BTC method, combined with rescaling based on PTC, successfully produces a fine-grained quality scale in JND units, demonstrating higher sensitivity to subtle compression artifacts compared to traditional methods. The study confirms that boosting techniques effectively enhance the visibility of artifacts, leading to more accurate quality assessments in the high-fidelity range.

Main Conclusions:

The research concludes that the proposed methodology offers a robust and sensitive approach for evaluating the visual quality of high-fidelity compressed images. The use of JND units provides a more informative and practical measure of quality, enabling a better understanding of user perception in the high-quality range.

Significance:

This research significantly contributes to the field of image quality assessment by introducing a novel methodology specifically designed for high-fidelity compressed images. The proposed method and the generated dataset have the potential to advance the development of future image compression standards and evaluation techniques.

Limitations and Future Research:

The study acknowledges the dependence of the boosting transformation on the source image and distortion type, suggesting further investigation into optimizing boosting parameters. Future research could explore the generalization of the proposed methodology to video quality assessment and investigate its applicability in real-world scenarios.

İstatistikler

Five images were used, compressed with five codecs (JPEG, JPEG 2000, VVC Intra, JPEG XL, and AVIF) at 10 bitrates each.
440,000 triplet question responses were collected in a crowdsourcing campaign.
The BTC method showed a quality scale improvement by a factor of 2 compared to traditional methods.
The study used a 70% accuracy threshold for determining reliable batches of responses.

Alıntılar

"Traditional subjective quality assessment techniques [...] are often effective for evaluating images with low and medium visual quality. However, [...] they fall short when adopted to evaluate the visual quality of high-fidelity contents, which requires distinguishing images with subtle variations in visual quality."
"The boosted scales are, as expected, larger than the unboosted ones by a factor of about 2. This means that the precision of the aligned scales is also about twice as good as the precision obtainable without boosting."
"The results, provided in JND units, offer new useful information in applications that are not available from traditional DMOS values. For example, this facilitates the estimation of satisfied user ratios in the most relevant range from high to lossless visual quality."

Önemli Bilgiler Şuradan Elde Edildi

Fine-grained subjective visual quality assessment for high-fidelity compressed images

by Michela Test... : arxiv.org 10-15-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09501.pdf

Daha Derin Sorular

How might this new methodology for assessing image quality influence the development of future image compression algorithms?

This new methodology, with its focus on fine-grained subjective visual quality assessment and the use of Just Noticeable Difference (JND) units, has the potential to significantly influence the development of future image compression algorithms in several ways:

Optimization Targets: Current compression algorithms often aim to minimize distortion based on mathematical metrics like PSNR or SSIM. However, these metrics don't always correlate well with human perception. By providing a more accurate measure of perceived quality, the JND-based approach allows for the development of algorithms specifically optimized to minimize perceptually noticeable distortions. This could lead to codecs that achieve higher visual quality at the same bitrate or maintain the same visual quality at lower bitrates.
Adaptive Compression: The understanding that boosting techniques can influence artifact visibility could lead to compression algorithms that adapt to the content and viewing conditions. For instance, areas of an image with high detail or areas expected to be viewed on larger displays could be compressed differently to account for variations in human visual sensitivity.
Visually Lossless Compression: The methodology's emphasis on the high-fidelity and visually lossless quality range provides a valuable tool for developing and evaluating codecs specifically designed for applications where even subtle distortions are unacceptable, such as medical imaging, archival, or high-end photography.
Perceptual Coding: The insights gained from analyzing the subjective responses and the impact of boosting techniques could contribute to the development of more sophisticated perceptual coding models. These models could better predict how humans perceive compression artifacts and guide the compression process to allocate bits more efficiently.

Could the reliance on subjective assessments through crowdsourcing introduce biases or inconsistencies in the evaluation process, and how can these limitations be mitigated?

While crowdsourcing offers a scalable and cost-effective approach to subjective assessment, it does come with inherent challenges related to potential biases and inconsistencies. Here's how these limitations can be mitigated:

Rigorous Quality Control: Implementing strict quality control measures is crucial. This includes using trap questions to identify unreliable workers, filtering out inconsistent responses, and employing statistical methods to ensure data integrity. The paper highlights the use of trap questions and batch filtering based on accuracy for this purpose.
Bias Identification and Correction: The study design should incorporate methods to identify and correct for potential biases. For example, the use of bias-checking comparisons, as described in the paper, helps detect and mitigate order bias. Other biases, such as those related to display calibration or viewing conditions, can be minimized through careful instructions and pre-screening of participants.
Demographic Considerations: The demographics of the crowd workers (age, cultural background, visual acuity, etc.) can influence perception. Collecting and analyzing demographic data allows researchers to identify and account for potential demographic biases in the results.
Calibration and Validation: Regularly calibrating the experimental platform and validating the results against those obtained through lab-based studies with controlled environments can help ensure consistency and reliability over time.

If visual quality assessment could be measured with perfect accuracy, how might this impact the way we experience and interact with digital images in art, design, and everyday life?

The ability to measure visual quality with perfect accuracy would have profound implications across various domains:

Art and Design: Artists and designers could leverage this capability to make precise, quantifiable decisions about image compression, ensuring their creative vision is preserved across different platforms and devices. This could lead to new art forms and design aesthetics that exploit the interplay between compression artifacts and perception.
Immersive Experiences: In virtual and augmented reality, accurate quality assessment would be crucial for creating truly immersive and believable experiences. It would allow developers to optimize content for minimal visual artifacts, enhancing realism and user engagement.
Digital Content Creation and Consumption: Imagine streaming platforms that automatically adjust video quality based not just on bandwidth but also on the viewer's visual sensitivity and the content being displayed. This personalized approach would optimize the viewing experience while minimizing bandwidth usage.
Medical Imaging and Scientific Visualization: In fields where accurate image interpretation is critical, perfect quality assessment would be invaluable. It would enable the development of compression algorithms that preserve diagnostic information, leading to more accurate diagnoses and better patient outcomes.
Historical Preservation: Archiving and preserving visual content for future generations would be revolutionized. We could ensure that digital representations of artworks, photographs, and historical documents retain their visual integrity over time.
However, it's important to remember that human perception is complex and influenced by numerous factors beyond just pixel-level accuracy. Even with perfect measurement tools, subjective preferences and contextual factors will continue to play a role in how we experience and value visual content.