TY - GEN
T1 - Using structural similarity quality metrics to evaluate image compression techniques
AU - Brooks, Alan C.
AU - Pappas, Thrasyvoulos N.
PY - 2007
Y1 - 2007
N2 - Perceptual image quality metrics have explicitly accounted for perceptual characteristics of the human visual system (HVS) by modeling sensitivity to subband noise as the just-noticeable threshold of distortion. While such metrics can successfully account for contrast and luminance masking, they are quite sensitive to spatial shifts, intensity shifts, contrast changes, and scale changes. In contrast, the recently proposed Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) metrics account for perception more implicitly with the assumption that the HVS is adapted for extracting structural information (relative spatial covariance) from images. As such, they have the potential to be much more effective in quantifying suprathreshold compression artifacts than traditional perceptual metrics, as such artifacts tend to distort the structure of an image. We use a (perceptually) weighted variation of the Complex Wavelet SSIM (CWSSIM) to evaluate standard image compression techniques such as JPEG, JPEG 2000, SPIHT, and the Safranek-Johnston perceptual image coder. Our experimental results indicate that the weighted CWSSIM generally agrees with subjective evaluations.
AB - Perceptual image quality metrics have explicitly accounted for perceptual characteristics of the human visual system (HVS) by modeling sensitivity to subband noise as the just-noticeable threshold of distortion. While such metrics can successfully account for contrast and luminance masking, they are quite sensitive to spatial shifts, intensity shifts, contrast changes, and scale changes. In contrast, the recently proposed Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) metrics account for perception more implicitly with the assumption that the HVS is adapted for extracting structural information (relative spatial covariance) from images. As such, they have the potential to be much more effective in quantifying suprathreshold compression artifacts than traditional perceptual metrics, as such artifacts tend to distort the structure of an image. We use a (perceptually) weighted variation of the Complex Wavelet SSIM (CWSSIM) to evaluate standard image compression techniques such as JPEG, JPEG 2000, SPIHT, and the Safranek-Johnston perceptual image coder. Our experimental results indicate that the weighted CWSSIM generally agrees with subjective evaluations.
KW - Image compression
KW - JPEG
KW - JPEG 2000
KW - Perceptual quality
KW - Perceptual subband image coder
KW - Structural similarity
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=34547508888&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=34547508888&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICASSP.2007.366047
DO - 10.1109/ICASSP.2007.366047
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:34547508888
SN - 1424407281
SN - 9781424407286
T3 - ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings
SP - I873-I876
BT - 2007 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP '07
T2 - 2007 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP '07
Y2 - 15 April 2007 through 20 April 2007
ER -