The Impact of H.264 Non-Desynchronizing Bits on Visual Quality and its Application to Robust Video Decoding

Foliar sprays or root dips of synthetic abscisic acid (s-ABA) have shown to reduce the transpiration rate and subsequently prolong postharvest longevity in a select group of herbaceous ornamental crops. The objective of our study was to determine the impact of s-ABA on postproduction performance of seed impatiens in greenhouse or low light conditions. Market ready Impatiens wallerana `Xtreme Scarlet' plants were sprayed or the root substrate was drenched with s-ABA at 250 or 500 mg·L–1 then boxed for 48 h to represent shipping conditions. Flower number was measured 3 days after application, and again after plants were hydrated following the day when the last treatment wilted 0, 2, 4, 8, 16, or 24 days after application. Visual quality ratings were made 0, 2, 3, 4, 8, 11, 16, or 19 days after application and again after plants were re-irrigated. Drenching the substrate with s-ABA at 500 mg·L–1 maintained foliage and flower turgidity up to 8 days in the greenhouse environment and 16 days in the low light environment. Substrate drenches at 500 mg·L–1 dramatically decreased flower number after removal from the shipping box under greenhouse conditions, and in the low light environment drenching the substrate at 250 mg·L–1 produced similar visual quality results to 500 mg·L–1 16 days after treatment. Plants drenched at 250 mg·L–1 also had the same number of flowers 3 and 20 days after treatment, when compared to 500 mg·L–1. Therefore, impatiens growers should drench the root substrate with s-ABA at 250 mg·L–1 to reduce labor costs associated with hand-watering and prolong postproduction performance in low light conditions, such as indoor retail conditions.

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‘On the very Verge of legitimate Invention’: Charles Bonnet and William Blake’s illustrations to Robert Blair’s The Grave (1808)

The Gothic and Death ◽

10.7228/manchester/9781784992699.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Sibylle Erle

Keyword(s):

Death And Dying ◽

Visual Quality ◽

European Context ◽

The Impact ◽

Immortality Of The Soul

This chapter discusses William Blake’s response to Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy (178998) and awareness of Charles Bonnet’s ideas about the afterlife in order to highlight the complexity of Blake’s illustrations to the new edition of Robert Blair’s The Grave published by R. H. Cromek in 1808. Blake was extremely fond of drawing souls. It is, however, often impossible to tell a rendering of living soul from a dead one. This chapter examines Blake’s relationship with the Gothic’s preoccupation with death and dying and explains, via the European context, how the impact of Blake’s images supersedes the Gothic and visual quality of language of Blair’s text. Blake’s drawings of the spiritual are not spontaneous sketches but evidence for his awareness of Lavater’s physiognomical theory and specifically the European debate about the immortality of the soul.

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THE RESEARCH ON THE IMPACT ASSESSMENT OF VISUAL LANDSCAPE OF COUNTRY PARKS IN BEIJING

Journal of Environmental Engineering and Landscape Management ◽

10.3846/16486897.2015.1106545 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 24 (1) ◽

pp. 37-47 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Chuanan LIU ◽

Tong QI ◽

Xiao MA

Keyword(s):

Impact Assessment ◽

Visual Space ◽

Visual Quality ◽

First Grade ◽

Visual Disturbance ◽

Absorption Capacity ◽

Visual Environment ◽

Entropy Weight ◽

The Impact

The attribute of a country park and its visual environment are not only influenced by the distance from the park to the downtown area, but also the degree of urbanization. Based on the landscape geography, landscape ecology, landscape aesthetics theories and the Guideline for Technical Review of Environmental Impact Assessment of Construction Projects (HJ 616-2011) and aiming to evaluate the visual quality of the country parks, we put forward three first-grade indicators (visual sensitive capacity, visual space capacity and visual absorption capacity) and seven second grade indicators (sighting distance, visual disturbance frequency, green looking ratio, inter-visibility, openness, relative angle and the relative area of artificial matrix) in our research. By virtue of the established entropy weight method model, combined with field data, the quantitative research of the visual environment of landscape in country parks was carried out so that the visual quality of the park can be improved. At same time, this can also provide a scientific basis for spatial planning of urban fringe area and repositioning of the park attribute.

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Expendable or valuable?

Journalistica - Tidsskrift for forskning i journalistik ◽

10.7146/journalistica.v15i1.125417 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Maria Nilsson

Keyword(s):

Structural Changes ◽

Qualitative Interviews ◽

Visual Quality ◽

External Factors ◽

Organizational Changes ◽

Breaking News ◽

Competitive Edge ◽

External Sources ◽

Visual Strategies ◽

The Impact

This study explores the impact of organizational changes on newspaper photo departments, an area of newsrooms that have arguably been particularly affected by structural changes in the field of journalism Through qualitative interviews with editors responsible for photojournalism at five Swedish newspapers that have experienced recent changes to photo staffing and routines for the sourcing of images, the study explores the following questions: Which routines do the newspapers have for sourcing images, in terms of in-house staff and external sources? How do notions of visual quality and external factors, such as audiences and competition, contribute to shaping the newspapers’ visual strategies? Findings indicate that newspapers rely on staff photojournalists for unique and in-depth coverage, but less for routine and breaking news. A certain expansion of photojournalism was found in some newsrooms where it is seen as a competitive edge; which, in part, challenges a “discourse of doom.” Uncertainty about the support for visual strategies in newsrooms lacking visual leadership was also found.

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КОМБІНОВАНА МЕТРИКА ВІЗУАЛЬНОЇ ЯКОСТІ ЗОБРАЖЕНЬ ДИСТАНЦІЙНОГО ЗОНДУВАННЯ НА ОСНОВІ НЕЙРОННОЇ МЕРЕЖІ

RADIOELECTRONIC AND COMPUTER SYSTEMS ◽

10.32620/reks.2020.4.01 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 4-15

Author(s):

Олег Игоревич Еремеев ◽

Владимир Васильевич Лукин ◽

Krzysztof Okarma

Keyword(s):

Neural Network ◽

Quality Assessment ◽

Rank Order ◽

Selection Criterion ◽

Visual Quality ◽

Quality Metrics ◽

Visual Quality Assessment ◽

Joint Application ◽

Subjective Estimates ◽

The Impact

The wide distribution of images of remote sensing (RS) of the Earth in various application areas makes it important to ensure the high quality of such images, which is important to identify necessary information. The complexity of the systems and the impact of various physical processes cause a significant number of distortions that lead to image corruption and possible loss of information. The use of processing methods that should reduce the impact of such factors requires control of their work, which uses quantitative indicators of visual quality. The article considers the task of creating a combined visual quality metric based on an artificial neural network (ANN), which provides high accuracy of visual quality assessment and stability of work on the noise characteristic of the RS. The problem of analysis of RS distortions is considered and the approach of using the database of test images TID2013 for verification on typical RS distortions is offered. The analysis of well-known visual quality metrics and their suitability for the estimation of such images is carried out. According to its results, it was determined that the best metrics provide the accuracy of image quality assessment for RS tasks at the level of 0.93 according to Spearman's rank-order correlation coefficient with subjective estimates of the TID2013 image database. The joint application of existing quality metrics allows eliminating the shortcomings of each of them and increasing the overall efficiency, so the article considers the problems and defines the requirements for creating a combined metric involving a neural network. A method of limiting the number of involved quality metrics with the involvement of Lasso regularization is proposed, which allows determining the most informative features (quality metrics) and simplifying the procedure of selection and reduction of their number. A study was conducted on the influence of the metric selection criterion and quantity on the accuracy of the combined metric. The influence of the structure of the neural network, the number of hidden layers, and the number of neurons in them are also analyzed. Based on the obtained results, the best implementation of ANN was selected, which with the involvement of 16 visual quality metrics allows achieving the accuracy of visual quality assessment at 0.97 according to Spearman's correlation with subjective estimates of the TID2013 database.

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Viewing Direction Based LSB Data Hiding in 360° Videos

Electronics ◽

10.3390/electronics10131527 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (13) ◽

pp. 1527

Author(s):

Dang Ninh Tran ◽

Hans-Jürgen Zepernick ◽

Thi My Chinh Chu

Keyword(s):

Data Hiding ◽

Gaussian Mixture Models ◽

Visual Quality ◽

Structural Similarity ◽

Gaussian Mixture ◽

Experimental Results ◽

Weight Functions ◽

Least Significant Bit ◽

Secret Data ◽

The Impact

In this paper, we propose a viewing direction based least significant bit (LSB) data hiding method for 360° videos. The distributions of viewing direction frequency for latitude and longitude are used to control the amount of secret data to be hidden at the latitude, longitude, or both latitude and longitude of 360° videos. Normalized Gaussian mixture models mimicking the viewing behavior of humans are formulated to define data hiding weight functions for latitude, longitude, and both latitude and longitude. On this basis, analytical expressions for the capacity offered by the proposed method to hide secret data in 360° cover videos are derived. Numerical results for the capacity using different numbers of bit planes and popular 360° video resolutions for data hiding are provided. The fidelity of the proposed method is assessed in terms of the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), weighted-to-spherically uniform PSNR (WS-PSNR), and non-content-based perceptual PSNR (NCP-PSNR). The experimental results illustrate that NCP-PSNR returns the highest fidelity because it gives lower weights to the impact of LSB data hiding on fidelity outside the front regions near the equator. The visual quality of the proposed method as perceived by humans is assessed using the structural similarity (SSIM) index and the non-content-based perceptual SSIM (NCP-SSIM) index. The experimental results show that both SSIM-based metrics are able to account for the spatial perceptual information of different scenes while the PSNR-based fidelity metrics cannot exploit this information. Furthermore, NCP-SSIM reflects much better the impact of the proposed method on visual quality with respect to viewing directions compared to SSIM.

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Understanding the impact of visual quality parameters on activities in immersive systems

2010 IEEE International Conference on Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interfaces and Measurement Systems ◽

10.1109/vecims.2010.5609356 ◽

2010 ◽

Author(s):

Rahul Malik ◽

Peter Bajcsy

Keyword(s):

Visual Quality ◽

Quality Parameters ◽

Immersive Systems ◽

The Impact

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Increased visual and cognitive demands emphasize the importance of meeting visual needs at all distances while driving

10.1101/2020.12.16.20248329 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Amigale Patoine ◽

Laura Mikula ◽

Sergio Mejía-Romero ◽

Jesse Michaels ◽

Océane Keruzore ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Visual Acuity ◽

Cognitive Load ◽

Driving Simulator ◽

Negative Impact ◽

Visual Quality ◽

Driving Behavior ◽

Driving Safety ◽

Quality Degradation ◽

Driving Scenario ◽

The Impact

ABSTRACTHaving an optimal quality of vision as well as adequate cognitive capacities is known to be essential for driving safety. However, the interaction between vision and cognitive mechanisms while driving remains unclear. We hypothesized that, in a context of high cognitive load, reduced visual acuity would have a negative impact on driving behavior, even when the acuity corresponds to the legal threshold for obtaining a driving license in Canada, and that the impact observed on driving performance would be greater with the increase in the threshold of degradation of visual acuity. In order to investigate this relationship, we examined driving behavior in a driving simulator under optimal and reduced vision conditions through two scenarios involving different levels of cognitive demand. These were: 1. a simple rural driving scenario with some pre-programmed events and 2. a highway driving scenario accompanied by a concurrent task involving the use of a navigation device. Two groups of visual quality degradation (lower/ higher) were evaluated according to their driving behavior. The results support the hypothesis: Driving behavior was less stable under reduced visual quality in the context of a high cognitive load and this effect was exacerbated when visual quality was more severely altered. These results support the idea that visual quality degradation impacts driving behavior when combined with a high mental workload driving environment while specifying that this impact is not present in the context of low cognitive load driving condition.

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Influence of Face Masks on the Use of Contact Lenses

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health ◽

10.3390/ijerph18147407 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 18 (14) ◽

pp. 7407

Author(s):

Clara Martinez-Perez ◽

Bruno Monteiro ◽

Mafalda Soares ◽

Fatima Portugues ◽

Sonia Matos ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Dry Eye ◽

Contact Lenses ◽

Visual Quality ◽

Face Mask ◽

Soft Contact ◽

Dry Eyes ◽

Soft Contact Lenses ◽

Eye Symptoms ◽

The Impact

Background: The COVID-19 epidemic is largely controlled by the use of face masks. The use of a face mask has been indicated as a strong cause of dry eye, although it is not yet described in the literature. This study aims to compare the impact of the use of masks on the visual quality of patients. The symptoms in the human eye intensified during the pandemic versus the symptoms before the pandemic, in a Portuguese population. Methods: A fifteen-question questionnaire was conducted to find out what changes occurred in the use of soft contact lenses during the pandemic in relation to the use of masks. Statistical analysis was performed with SPSS 27.0 software (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). Results: The use of contact lenses decreased compared with before the pandemic (p < 0.001). The number of hours of wear decreased significantly compared with before the pandemic (p < 0.001). The sensation of dry eyes was found to be worse in those using monthly replacement contact lenses (p = 0.034), and the need to remove contact lenses was more frequent in women (p = 0.026) after using a mask. Conclusions: Mask use increases dry eye symptoms in contact lens wearers, negatively impacting visual quality.

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