Computational Visual Perception for Image/Video Processing: Quality Assessment and Enhancement - Part 1

Over the last fifty years, research and development in image processing have been driving advances in many high-tech areas, including medical and scientific imaging, digital cinema, computational photography, biometrics, remote sensing, among others. With the development of new imaging modalities and multimedia products, many new approaches have been proposed in this field of research. The research focus is however steadily shifting towards developing new mathematical models rather than understanding the image signal as a physical quantity and its interaction with the observer; unfortunately, the human user is often ignored in the image processing chain. Whereas, in many applications, such as diagnosis, recognition and evaluation, the human observer plays a prominent role in decision-making, based on visual assessment of images. Therefore, exploiting knowledge about the Human Visual System (HVS) in the design of multimedia processing techniques appears as a promising direction.

This tutorial provides an overview of the most recent trends and of the future research in image and video processing in a common perceptually based computational framework. The most relevant characteristics and properties of the HVS are presented on the light of the recent findings in a concise and practical way. The concepts and methods will be introduced and illustrated through various real-world applications.