Image Quality Assessment with a Gabor Pyramid Model of the Human Visual
System
C.C. Taylor, Z. Pizlo, J.P. Allebach, and C.A. Bouman,
"Image Quality Assessment with a Gabor Pyramid Model of the Human Visual
System," Proceedings of the 1997 IS&T/SPIE
International Symposium on Electronic Imaging Science and Technology,
San Jose, CA, 8-14 February 1997, vol. 3016, pp. 58-69.
Abstract
Reliable image quality assessments are necessary for evaluating digital
imaging methods (halftoning techniques) and products (printers, displays).
Typically the quality of the imaging method or product is evaluated by
comparing the fidelity of an image before and after processing by the imaging
method or product. It is well established that simple approaches like mean
squared error do not provide meaningful measures of image fidelity. A number
of image fidelity metrics have been developed whose goal was to predict the
amount of differences that would be visible to a human observer. In this
paper we outline a new model of the human visual system (HVS) and show how
this model can be used in image quality assessment. Our model departs from
previous approaches in three ways: 1) We use a physiologically and
psychophysically plausible Gabor pyramid to model a receptive field
decomposition; 2) We use psychophysical experiments that directly assess
the percept we wish to model; and 3) We model discrimination performance by
using discrimination thresholds instead of detection thresholds. The first
psychophysical experiment tested the visual system's sensitivity as a
function of spatial frequency, orientation, and average luminance. The
second experiment tested the relation between contrast detection and contrast
discrimination.
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