Digital Video Quality – Vision Models and Metrics

Stefan Winkler was born in Horn, Austria. He received the M.Sc. degree with highest honors in electrical engineering from the University of Technology in Vienna, Austria, in 1996, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in 2000 for work on vision modeling and video quality measurement. He also spent one year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Fulbright student. He did internships at Siemens, ROLM, German Aerospace, Andersen Consulting, and Hewlett-Packard. In January 2001 he co-founded Genimedia (now Genista), a company developing perceptual quality metrics for multimedia applications. In October 2002, he returned to EPFL as a post-doctoral fellow, and he also held an assistant professor position at the University of Lausanne for a semester. Currently he is Chief Scientist at Genista Corporation. Dr Winkler has been an invited speaker at numerous technical conferences and seminars. He was organizer of a special session on video quality at VCIP 2003, technical program committee member for ICIP 2004 and WPMC 2004, and has been serving as a reviewer for several scientific journals. He is the author and co-author of over 30 publications on vision modeling and quality assessment.

About the Author. Acknowledgements. Acronyms. 1 Introduction. 1.1 Motivation. 1.2 Outline. 2 Vision. 2.1 Eye. 2.2 Retina. 2.3 Visual Pathways. 2.4 Sensitivity to Light. 2.5 Color Perception. 2.6 Masking and Adaptation. 2.7 Multi-channel Organization. 2.8 Summary. 3 Video Quality. 3.1 Video Coding and Compression. 3.2 Artifacts. 3.3 Visual Quality. 3.4 Quality Metrics. 3.5 Metric Evaluation. 3.6 Summary. 4 Models and Metrics. 4.1 Isotropic Contrast. 4.2 Perceptual Distortion Metric. 4.3 Summary. 5 Metric Evaluation. 5.1 Still Images. 5.2 Video. 5.3 Component Analysis. 5.4 Summary. 6 Metric Extensions. 6.1 Blocking Artifacts. 6.2 Object Segmentation. 6.3 Image Appeal. 6.4 Summary. 7 Closing Remarks. 7.1 Summary. 7.2 Perspectives. Appendix: Color Space Conversions. References. Index.