Two Principles of High-Level Human Visual Processing Potentially Useful for Image and Video Quality Assessment

Objective assessment of image and video quality should be based on a correct understanding of subjective assessment by human observers. Previous models have incorporated the mechanisms of early visual processing in image quality metrics, enabling us to evaluate the visibility of errors from the original images. However, to understand how human observers perceive image quality, one should also consider higher stages of visual processing where perception is established. In higher stages, the visual system presumably represents a visual scene as a collection of meaningful components such as objects and events. Our recent psychophysical studies suggest two principles related to this level of processing. First, the human visual system integrates shape and color signals along perceived motion trajectories in order to improve visibility of the shape and color of moving objects. Second, the human visual system estimates surface reflectance properties like glossiness using simple image statistics rather than by inverse computation of image formation optics. Although the underlying neural mechanisms are still under investigation, these computational principles are potentially useful for the development of effective image processing technologies and for quality assessment. Ideally, if a model can specify how a given image is transformed into high-level scene representations in the human brain, it would predict many aspects of subjective image quality, including fidelity and naturalness.