scholarly journals Perceptual Quality of Audio-Visual Content with Common Video and Audio Degradations

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (13) ◽  
pp. 5813
Author(s):  
Helard Becerra Martinez ◽  
Andrew Hines ◽  
Mylène C. Q. Farias
Keyword(s):  
Background Noise ◽  
Visual Quality ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Perceptual Quality ◽  
Great Effort ◽  
Visual Component ◽  
Video And Audio ◽  
Visual Artifacts ◽  
Tv Commercials

Audio-visual quality assessment remains as a complex research field. A great effort is being made to understand how visual and auditory domains are integrated and processed by humans. In this work, we analyzed and compared the results of three psychophisical experiments that collected quality and content scores given by a pool of subjects. The experiments include diverse content audio-visual material, e.g., Sports, TV Commercials, Interviews, Music, Documentaries and Cartoons, impaired with several visual (bitrate compression, packet-loss, and frame-freezing) and auditory (background noise, echo, clip, chop) distortions. Each experiment explores a particular domain. In Experiment 1, the video component was degraded with visual artifacts, meanwhile, the audio component did not suffer any type of degradation. In Experiment 2, the audio component was degraded while the video component remained untouched. Finally, in Experiment 3 both audio and video components were degraded. As expected, results confirmed a dominance of the visual component in the overall audio-visual quality. However, a detailed analysis showed that, for certain types of audio distortions, the audio component played a more important role in the construction of the overall perceived quality.

A novel point cloud quality assessment metric based on perceptual color distance patterns

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (9) ◽  
pp. 256-1-256-11
Author(s):  
Rafael Diniz ◽  
Pedro Garcia Freitas ◽  
Mylène Farias
Keyword(s):  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Point Cloud ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Perceptual Quality ◽  
Great Effort ◽  
Robust Performance ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Objective Quality ◽  
Novel Method

In recent years, PCs have become very popular for a wide range of applications, such as immersive virtual reality scenarios. As a consequence, in the last couple of years, there has been a great effort to develop novel acquisition, representation, compression, and transmission solutions for PC contents in the research community. In particular, the development of objective quality assessment methods that are able to predict the perceptual quality of PCs. In this paper, we present an effective novel method for assessing the quality of PCs, which is based on descriptors that extract perceptual color distance-based texture information of PC contents, called Perceptual Color Distance Patterns (PCDP). In this framework, the statistics of the extracted information are used to model the PC visual quality. Experimental results show that the proposed framework exhibit good and robust performance when compared with several state-of-the-art point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) methods.

scholarly journals Worldwide Research on the Ozone Influence in Plants

Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 1504
Author(s):  
Lucia Jimenez-Montenegro ◽  
Matilde Lopez-Fernandez ◽  
Estela Gimenez
Keyword(s):  
Research Field ◽  
Air Pollutant ◽  
Great Effort ◽  
Publication Type ◽  
Global Food Security ◽  
Biotic Stresses ◽  
Yield And Quality ◽  
Secondary Air ◽  
Near Future

Tropospheric ozone (O3) is a secondary air pollutant and a greenhouse gas, whose concentration has been increasing since the industrial era and is expected to increase further in the near future. O3 molecules can be inhaled by humans and animals, causing significant health problems; they can also diffuse through the leaf stomata of plants, triggering significant phytotoxic damage that entails a weakening of the plant, reducing its ability to cope with other abiotic and biotic stresses. This eventually leads to a reduction in the yield and quality of crops, which is a serious problem as it puts global food security at risk. Due to the importance of this issue, a bibliometric analysis on O3 in the plant research field is carried out through the Web of Science (WoS) database. Different aspects of the publications are analysed, such as the number of documents published per year, the corresponding scientific areas, distribution of documents by countries, institutions and languages, publication type and affiliations, and, finally, special attention is paid to O3 study in plants by means of studies about the word occurrence frequency in titles and abstracts, and the articles most frequently cited. The bibliometric study shows the great effort made by the scientific community in order to understand the damages caused by O3 in plants, which will help reduce the big losses that O3 causes in agriculture.

scholarly journals A secure image steganography based on JND model

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 2088
Author(s):  
Tuan Duc Nguyen ◽  
Dung Huu Le
Keyword(s):  
Selection Rule ◽  
Visual Quality ◽  
Channel Selection ◽  
Just Noticeable Difference ◽  
Perceptual Quality ◽  
Stego Image ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Matrix Embedding ◽  
Selection Of

Minimizing distortion produced by embedding process is very important to improve the security of hidden message and maintain the high visual quality of stego images. To achieve these objectives, an effective strategy is to perform pixel selection which is well-known as a channel selection rule. In this approach, a pixel associated with the smallest image degradation is chosen to carry secret bits. From these facts, in this paper, a new secure channel selection rule for digital images in spatial domain is designed and proposed. In this new approach, the modified matrix embedding method is utilized as data hiding method because it introduces more than one embedding change to be performed. This enables us to select a suitable pixel to embed message bits with less degradation yielded in a stego-image. In pixel selection of the proposed method, a just noticeable difference value and gradient value of a considering pixel are employed together. The experimental results (which were conducted on 10,000 uncompressed images) indicate that stego images of the proposed approach achieve a higher perceptual quality and security than those of the stego-images created by the previous approaches.

Enhancing Visual Quality of Multi-view 360 Video Compression Pipeline

2019 ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Junyoung Yun ◽  
Hong-Chang Shin ◽  
Gwangsoon Lee ◽  
Jong-Il Park
Keyword(s):  
Video Compression ◽  
Visual Quality

Singular Values Decomposition and Lifting Wavelet Transform for Speech Signal Embedding into Digital Image

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-151
Author(s):  
Mourad Talbi ◽  
Med Salim Bouhlel
Keyword(s):  
Wavelet Transform ◽  
Speech Signal ◽  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
Perceptual Quality ◽  
Lifting Wavelet Transform ◽  
Signal To Noise ◽  
Perceptual Evaluation ◽  
Lifting Wavelet ◽  
Noise Ratio

Background: In this paper, we propose a secure image watermarking technique which is applied to grayscale and color images. It consists in applying the SVD (Singular Value Decomposition) in the Lifting Wavelet Transform domain for embedding a speech image (the watermark) into the host image. Methods: It also uses signature in the embedding and extraction steps. Its performance is justified by the computation of PSNR (Pick Signal to Noise Ratio), SSIM (Structural Similarity), SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio), SegSNR (Segmental SNR) and PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation Speech Quality). Results: The PSNR and SSIM are used for evaluating the perceptual quality of the watermarked image compared to the original image. The SNR, SegSNR and PESQ are used for evaluating the perceptual quality of the reconstructed or extracted speech signal compared to the original speech signal. Conclusion: The Results obtained from computation of PSNR, SSIM, SNR, SegSNR and PESQ show the performance of the proposed technique.

State-of-the-Art: A Systematic Literature Review on Image Segmentation in Latent Fingerprint Forensics

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megha Chhabra ◽  
Manoj Kumar Shukla ◽  
Kiran Kumar Ravulakollu
Keyword(s):  
Image Segmentation ◽  
Background Noise ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Recognition Rate ◽  
Poor Quality ◽  
Latent Fingerprint ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The Comparative Study ◽  
Finger Skin

: Latent fingerprints are unintentional finger skin impressions left as ridge patterns at crime scenes. A major challenge in latent fingerprint forensics is the poor quality of the lifted image from the crime scene. Forensics investigators are in permanent search of novel outbreaks of the effective technologies to capture and process low quality image. The accuracy of the results depends upon the quality of the image captured in the beginning, metrics used to assess the quality and thereafter level of enhancement required. The low quality of the image collected by low quality scanners, unstructured background noise, poor ridge quality, overlapping structured noise result in detection of false minutiae and hence reduce the recognition rate. Traditionally, Image segmentation and enhancement is partially done manually using help of highly skilled experts. Using automated systems for this work, differently challenging quality of images can be investigated faster. This survey amplifies the comparative study of various segmentation techniques available for latent fingerprint forensics.

“The Past, Present, and Future of Accounting History”: A Comment on the State of Accounting History

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garry D. Carnegie
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Research Field ◽  
The State ◽  
International Accounting ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Recent Contribution ◽  
Global Society ◽  
Accounting History ◽  
The Past

ABSTRACT This response to the recent contribution by Matthews (2019) entitled “The Past, Present, and Future of Accounting History” specifically deals with the issues associated with concentrating on counting publication numbers in examining the state of a scholarly research field at the start of the 2020s. It outlines several pitfalls with the narrowly focused publications count analysis, in selected English language journals only, as provided by Matthews. The commentary is based on three key arguments: (1) accounting history research and publication is far more than a “numbers game”; (2) trends in the quality of the research undertaken and published are paramount; and (3) international publication and accumulated knowledge in accounting history are indeed more than a collection of English language publications. The author seeks to contribute to discussion and debate between accounting historians and other researchers for the benefit and development of the international accounting history community and global society.

scholarly journals ART-UP: A Novel Method for Generating Scanning-Robust Aesthetic QR Codes

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Mingliang Xu ◽  
Qingfeng Li ◽  
Jianwei Niu ◽  
Hao Su ◽  
Xiting Liu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Visual Quality ◽  
Qr Code ◽  
Quick Response ◽  
Estimation Model ◽  
Qr Codes ◽  
Excellent Performance ◽  
Novel Method ◽  
Coarse To Fine

Quick response (QR) codes are usually scanned in different environments, so they must be robust to variations in illumination, scale, coverage, and camera angles. Aesthetic QR codes improve the visual quality, but subtle changes in their appearance may cause scanning failure. In this article, a new method to generate scanning-robust aesthetic QR codes is proposed, which is based on a module-based scanning probability estimation model that can effectively balance the tradeoff between visual quality and scanning robustness. Our method locally adjusts the luminance of each module by estimating the probability of successful sampling. The approach adopts the hierarchical, coarse-to-fine strategy to enhance the visual quality of aesthetic QR codes, which sequentially generate the following three codes: a binary aesthetic QR code, a grayscale aesthetic QR code, and the final color aesthetic QR code. Our approach also can be used to create QR codes with different visual styles by adjusting some initialization parameters. User surveys and decoding experiments were adopted for evaluating our method compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, which indicates that the proposed approach has excellent performance in terms of both visual quality and scanning robustness.

Effect of defocus combined with rotation on the optical performance of trifocal toric IOLs

2021 ◽  
pp. 112067212110021
Author(s):  
Javier Ruiz-Alcocer ◽  
Irene Martínez-Alberquilla ◽  
Amalia Lorente-Velázquez ◽  
José F Alfonso ◽  
David Madrid-Costa
Keyword(s):  
Visual Quality ◽  
Optical Quality ◽  
Refractive Errors ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Modulation Transfer ◽  
Optical Analysis ◽  
Toric Intraocular Lens ◽  
Toric Iols ◽  
Reference Situation

Purpose: To objectively analyze the optical quality of the FineVision Toric intraocular lens (IOL) with two cylinder powers when different combinations of rotations and residual refractive errors are induced. Methods: This study assessed the FineVision Toric IOL with two different cylinder powers: 1.5 and 3.0 diopters (D). Three different rotation positions were considered: centered, 5° and 10° rotated. An optical bench (PMTF) was used for optical analysis. The optical quality of the IOLs was calculated by the modulation transfer function (MTF) at five different focal points (0.0, 0.25, 0.50, 0.75, and 1.00 D). Results: The MTF averaged value of the reference situation was 38.58 and 37.74 for 1.5 and 3.0 D of cylinder, respectively. For the 1.5 D cylinder, the combination of 5° of rotation with a defocus of 0.25, 0.50, 0.75, and 1.0 D induced a decrease on the MTF of 12.39, 19.94, 23.43, 24.23 units, respectively. When induced rotation was 10°, the MTF decrease was 17.26, 23.40, 24.33, 24.48 units, respectively. For the 3.0 D cylinder, the combination of 5° with 0.25, 0.50, 0.75, and 1.0 D of defocus, induced a decrease on the MTF of 12.51, 18.97, 22.36, 22.48 units, respectively. When induced rotation was 10°, the MTF decrease was: 18.42, 21.57, 23.08, and 23.61 units, respectively. Conclusion: For both FineVision Toric IOLs there is a certain optical tolerance to rotations up to 5° or residual refractive errors up to 0.25 D. Situations over these limits and their combination would affect the visual quality of patients implanted with these trifocal toric IOLs.

Cents versus scale steps: Can we tell the difference between major and minor thirds?

2021 ◽  
pp. 030573562098727
Author(s):  
Pedro Neto ◽  
Patricia M Vanzella
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Processing ◽  
Perceptual Quality ◽  
Chromatic Scale ◽  
Major Scale ◽  
Accurate Performance ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Scale Step ◽  
Frequency Ratios ◽  
Tonal Context

We report an experiment in which participants ( N = 368) were asked to differentiate between major and minor thirds. These intervals could either be formed by diatonic tones from the C major scale (tonal condition) or by a subset of tones from the chromatic scale (atonal condition). We hypothesized that in the tonal condition intervals would be perceived as a function of scale step distances, which we defined as the number of diatonic leaps between two notes of a given music scale. In the atonal condition, we hypothesized that intervals would be perceived as a function of cents. If our hypotheses were supported, we should verify a less accurate performance in the tonal condition, where scale step distances are the same between major and minor thirds. The data corroborated our hypotheses, and we suggest that acoustic measurements of intervallic distances (i.e., frequency ratios and cents) are not optimal when it comes to describing the perceptual quality of intervals in a tonal context. Finally, our research points to the possibility that, in comparison with previous models, scale steps and cents might better capture the notion of global versus local instances of auditory processing.

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