Digital Video Quality

Visual quality assessment is an interdisciplinary topic that links image/video processing, psychology and physiology. Many engineers are familiar with the image/video processing; transmission networks side of things but not with the perceptual aspects pertaining to quality. Digital Video Quality first introduces the concepts of human vision and visual quality. Based on these, specific video quality metrics are developed and their design is presented. These metrics are then evaluated and used in a number of applications, including image/video compression, transmission and watermarking.

• Introduces the concepts of human vision and vision quality.
• Presents the design and development of specific video quality metrics.
• Evaluates video quality metrics in the context of image/video compression, transmission and watermarking.
• Presents tools developed for the analysis of video quality

What the eye does not see, compression gets away with.

Digital Video Quality presents a comprehensive introduction to vision modeling and video quality assessment. The rapid spread of digital imaging systems poses an important new challenge: optimizing their performance with respect to the capture, display, storage and transmission of visual information. This problem has prompted the intensified study of vision models and visual quality metrics in recent years.

Maintaining an interdisciplinary approach that addresses image and video processing, physiology and psychology, this book:

• highlights the importance of perceptual aspects pertaining to quality by reviewing the anatomy and physiology of the human visual system;

• presents detailed guidelines for the design of vision models and quality metrics for image processing applications;

• evaluates the prediction performance of quality metrics in the context of video compression and transmission;

• describes metric extensions with features such as image appeal attributes, segmentation support for specific artefacts and objects of interest.

Digital Video Quality is essential reading for video professionals and technical managers working in the multimedia and telecommunications industries. It also provides an invaluable resource for engineers designing or implementing video compression and transmission systems. Researchers and graduate students in the fields of image processing and communication will find this book a useful reference.

Stefan Winkler was born in Horn, Austria. He received the M.Sc. degree with highest honors in electrical engineering from the University of Technology in Vienna, Austria, in 1996, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in 2000 for work on vision modeling and video quality measurement. He also spent one year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Fulbright student. He did internships at Siemens, ROLM, German Aerospace, Andersen Consulting, and Hewlett-Packard.

In January 2001 he co-founded Genimedia (now Genista), a company developing perceptual quality metrics for multimedia applications. In October 2002, he returned to EPFL as a post-doctoral fellow, and he also held an assistant professor position at the University of Lausanne for a semester. Currently he is Chief Scientist at Genista Corporation.

Dr Winkler has been an invited speaker at numerous technical conferences and seminars. He was organizer of a special session on video quality at VCIP 2003, technical program committee member for ICIP 2004 and WPMC 2004, and has been serving as a reviewer for several scientific journals. He is the author and co-author of over 30 publications on vision modeling and quality assessment.