Zhengfang Duanmu

Zhengfang Duanmu, Wentao Liu, Zhongling Wang et al.

Image quality assessment (IQA) models aim to establish a quantitative relationship between visual images and their perceptual quality by human observers. IQA modeling plays a special bridging role between vision science and engineering practice, both as a test-bed for vision theories and computational biovision models, and as a powerful tool that could potentially make profound impact on a broad range of image processing, computer vision, and computer graphics applications, for design, optimization, and evaluation purposes. IQA research has enjoyed an accelerated growth in the past two decades. Here we present an overview of IQA methods from a Bayesian perspective, with the goals of unifying a wide spectrum of IQA approaches under a common framework and providing useful references to fundamental concepts accessible to vision scientists and image processing practitioners. We discuss the implications of the successes and limitations of modern IQA methods for biological vision and the prospect for vision science to inform the design of future artificial vision systems.

Zhengfang Duanmu, Wentao Liu, Zhuoran Li et al.

The diversity of video delivery pipeline poses a grand challenge to the evaluation of adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming algorithms and objective quality-of-experience (QoE) models. Here we introduce so-far the largest subject-rated database of its kind, namely WaterlooSQoE-IV, consisting of 1350 adaptive streaming videos created from diverse source contents, video encoders, network traces, ABR algorithms, and viewing devices. We collect human opinions for each video with a series of carefully designed subjective experiments. Subsequent data analysis and testing/comparison of ABR algorithms and QoE models using the database lead to a series of novel observations and interesting findings, in terms of the effectiveness of subjective experiment methodologies, the interactions between user experience and source content, viewing device and encoder type, the heterogeneities in the bias and preference of user experiences, the behaviors of ABR algorithms, and the performance of objective QoE models. Most importantly, our results suggest that a better objective QoE model, or a better understanding of human perceptual experience and behaviour, is the most dominating factor in improving the performance of ABR algorithms, as opposed to advanced optimization frameworks, machine learning strategies or bandwidth predictors, where a majority of ABR research has been focused on in the past decade. On the other hand, our performance evaluation of 11 QoE models shows only a moderate correlation between state-of-the-art QoE models and subjective ratings, implying rooms for improvement in both QoE modeling and ABR algorithms. The database is made publicly available at: \url{https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~zduanmu/waterloosqoe4/}.

Zhengfang Duanmu, Wentao Liu, Zhuoran Li et al.

Rate-distortion (RD) theory is at the heart of lossy data compression. Here we aim to model the generalized RD (GRD) trade-off between the visual quality of a compressed video and its encoding profiles (e.g., bitrate and spatial resolution). We first define the theoretical functional space $\mathcal{W}$ of the GRD function by analyzing its mathematical properties.We show that $\mathcal{W}$ is a convex set in a Hilbert space, inspiring a computational model of the GRD function, and a method of estimating model parameters from sparse measurements. To demonstrate the feasibility of our idea, we collect a large-scale database of real-world GRD functions, which turn out to live in a low-dimensional subspace of $\mathcal{W}$. Combining the GRD reconstruction framework and the learned low-dimensional space, we create a low-parameter eigen GRD method to accurately estimate the GRD function of a source video content from only a few queries. Experimental results on the database show that the learned GRD method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art empirical RD estimation methods both in accuracy and efficiency. Last, we demonstrate the promise of the proposed model in video codec comparison.

Zhengfang Duanmu, Wentao Liu, Diqi Chen et al.

The fundamental conflict between the enormous space of adaptive streaming videos and the limited capacity for subjective experiment casts significant challenges to objective Quality-of-Experience (QoE) prediction. Existing objective QoE models exhibit complex functional form, failing to generalize well in diverse streaming environments. In this study, we propose an objective QoE model namely knowledge-driven streaming quality index (KSQI) to integrate prior knowledge on the human visual system and human annotated data in a principled way. By analyzing the subjective characteristics towards streaming videos from a corpus of subjective studies, we show that a family of QoE functions lies in a convex set. Using a variant of projected gradient descent, we optimize the objective QoE model over a database of training videos. The proposed KSQI demonstrates strong generalizability to diverse streaming environments, evident by state-of-the-art performance on four publicly available benchmark datasets.