A new standard method of subjective assessment of barely visible image artifacts and a new public database. Issue 12 (2nd June 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hoffman, David M.; Stolitzka, Dale
• Is Part Of: Journal of the Society for Information Display. Volume 22:Issue 12(2014:Dec.)
• Page Start: 631
• Page End: 643
• Publication Date: 2015-06-02
• Subjects: Information display systems -- Periodicals; 621.38154205
• DOI: 10.1002/jsid.297
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1071-0922

Abstract

<abstract abstract-type="main"> <title>Abstract</title> <p>Assessing image quality is an important aspect of developing new display technology. A particularly challenging assessment is determining whether a bitwise lossy operation is visually lossless. We define "visually lossless" and describe a new standard for a subjective procedure to assess whether the image quality meets these criteria. Assessments are made between a reference image and temporally interleaved reference and test images using a forced‐choice procedure. In extensive testing, we have validated that this method is suitable for discriminating between subtle differences in image rendering and is free of observer bias or criteria variability. The results of these tests demonstrate the efficacy of using as few as five randomly chosen observers. We have found that the subjective testing is more reliable than several widely available image quality metrics. As part of this work, we release a database of nearly 0.25 million subjective responses collected from 35 observers to 18 different images. The study uses a largely within‐subjects design and tested observers from two viewing distances. We encourage the use of this dataset in future research to refine objective image quality metrics to improve predictability of subtle but potentially visible compression‐induced image impairments.</p> </abstract>