Previous research utilizing Cartoon Generative Adversarial Network(CartoonGAN)has encountered limitations in managing intricate outlines and accurately representing lighting effects,particularly in complex scenes requ...Previous research utilizing Cartoon Generative Adversarial Network(CartoonGAN)has encountered limitations in managing intricate outlines and accurately representing lighting effects,particularly in complex scenes requiring detailed shading and contrast.This paper presents a novel Enhanced Pixel Integration(EPI)technique designed to improve the visual quality of images generated by CartoonGAN.Rather than modifying the core model,the EPI approach employs post-processing adjustments that enhance images without significant computational overhead.In this method,images produced by CartoonGAN are converted from Red-Green-Blue(RGB)to Hue-Saturation-Value(HSV)format,allowing for precise adjustments in hue,saturation,and brightness,thereby improving color fidelity.Specific correction values are applied to fine-tune colors,ensuring they closely match the original input while maintaining the characteristic,stylized effect of CartoonGAN.The corrected images are blended with the originals to retain aesthetic appeal and visual distinctiveness,resulting in improved color accuracy and overall coherence.Experimental results demonstrate that EPI significantly increases similarity to original input images compared to the standard CartoonGAN model,achieving a 40.14%enhancement in visual similarity in Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity(LPIPS),a 30.21%improvement in structural consistency in Structural Similarity Index Measure(SSIM),and an 11.81%reduction in pixel-level error in Mean Squared Error(MSE).By addressing limitations present in the traditional CartoonGAN pipeline,EPI offers practical enhancements for creative applications,particularly within media and design fields where visual fidelity and artistic style preservation are critical.These improvements align with the goals of Fog and Edge Computing,which also seek to enhance processing efficiency and application performance in sensitive industries such as healthcare,logistics,and education.This research not only resolves key deficiencies in existing CartoonGAN models but also expands its potential applications in image-based content creation,bridging gaps between technical constraints and creative demands.Future studies may explore the adaptability of EPI across various datasets and artistic styles,potentially broadening its impact on visual transformation tasks.展开更多
Objective:In the Radiology Department of Mzuzu Central Hospital(MCH),daily training for radiographers now includes content on Computed Tomography(CT)image quality control and equipment maintenance to ensure the normal...Objective:In the Radiology Department of Mzuzu Central Hospital(MCH),daily training for radiographers now includes content on Computed Tomography(CT)image quality control and equipment maintenance to ensure the normal,continuous,and stable operation of the 16-slice spiral CT scanner.Methods:Through comprehensive analysis of relevant equipment,we have identified key parameters that significantly impact CT image quality.Innovative optimization strategies and solutions targeting these parameters have been developed and integrated into daily training programs.Furthermore,starting from an examination of prevalent failure modes observed in CT equipment,we delve into essential maintenance and preservation techniques that CT technologists must master to ensure optimal system performance.Results:(1)Crucial factors affecting CT image quality include artifacts,noise,partial volume effects,and surrounding gap phenomena,alongside spatial and density resolutions,CT dose,reconstruction algorithms,and human factors during the scanning process.In the daily training for radiographers,emphasis is placed on strictly implementing image quality control measures at every stage of the CT scanning process and skillfully applying advanced scanning and image processing techniques.By doing so,we can provide clinicians with accurate and reliable imaging references for diagnosis and treatment.(2)Strategies for CT equipment maintenance:①Environmental inspection of the CT room to ensure cleanliness and hygiene.②Rational and accurate operation,including calibration software proficiency.③Regular maintenance and servicing for minimizing machine downtime.④Maintenance of the CT X-ray tube.CT technicians can become proficient in equipment maintenance and upkeep techniques through training,which can significantly extend the service life of CT systems and reduce the occurrence of malfunctions.Conclusion:Through the regular implementation of rigorous CT image quality control training for radiology technicians,coupled with diligent and proactive CT equipment maintenance,we have observed profound and beneficial impacts on improving image quality.The accuracy and fidelity of radiological data ultimately leads to more accurate diagnoses and effective treatments.展开更多
Recent deep neural network(DNN)based blind image quality assessment(BIQA)approaches take mean opinion score(MOS)as ground-truth labels,which would lead to cross-datasets biases and limited generalization ability of th...Recent deep neural network(DNN)based blind image quality assessment(BIQA)approaches take mean opinion score(MOS)as ground-truth labels,which would lead to cross-datasets biases and limited generalization ability of the DNN-based BIQA model.This work validates the natural instability of MOS through investigating the neuropsychological characteristics inside the human visual system during quality perception.By combining persistent homology analysis with electroencephalogram(EEG),the physiologically meaningful features of the brain responses to different distortion levels are extracted.The physiological features indicate that although volunteers view exactly the same image content,their EEG features are quite varied.Based on the physiological results,we advocate treating MOS as noisy labels and optimizing the DNN based BIQA model with earlystop strategies.Experimental results on both innerdataset and cross-dataset demonstrate the superiority of our optimization approach in terms of generalization ability.展开更多
Most blind image quality assessment(BIQA)methods require a large amount of time to collect human opinion scores as training labels,which limits their usability in practice.Thus,we present an opinion-unaware BIQA metho...Most blind image quality assessment(BIQA)methods require a large amount of time to collect human opinion scores as training labels,which limits their usability in practice.Thus,we present an opinion-unaware BIQA method based on deep reinforcement learning which is trained without subjective scores,named DRL-IQA.Inspired by the human visual perception process,our model is formulated as a quality reinforced agent,which consists of the dynamic distortion generation part and the quality perception part.By considering the image distortion degradation process as a sequential decision-making process,the dynamic distortion generation part can develop a strategy to add as many different distortions as possible to an image,which enriches the distortion space to alleviate overfitting.A reward function calculated from quality degradation after adding distortion is utilized to continuously optimize the strategy.Furthermore,the quality perception part can extract rich quality features from the quality degradation process without using subjective scores,and accurately predict the state values that represent the image quality.Experimental results reveal that our method achieves competitive quality prediction performance compared to other state-of-the-art BIQA methods.展开更多
To further explore the human visual system（ HVS）,the perceptual grouping（ PG）, which has been proven to play an important role in the HVS, is adopted to design an effective image quality assessment（ IQA） model. ...To further explore the human visual system（ HVS）,the perceptual grouping（ PG）, which has been proven to play an important role in the HVS, is adopted to design an effective image quality assessment（ IQA） model. Compared with the existing fixed-window-based models, the proposed one is an adaptive window-like model that introduces the perceptual grouping strategy into the IQA model. It works as follows： first,it preprocesses the images by clustering similar pixels into a group to the greatest extent; then the structural similarity is used to compute the similarity of the superpixels between reference and distorted images; finally, it integrates all the similarity of superpixels of an image to yield a quality score. Experimental results on three databases（ LIVE, IVC and MICT） showthat the proposed method yields good performance in terms of correlation with human judgments of visual quality.展开更多
A semi-reference image quality assessment metric based on similarity measurement for synthesized virtual viewpoint image （VVI） in free-viewpoint television system （FFV） is proposed in this paper. The key point of ...A semi-reference image quality assessment metric based on similarity measurement for synthesized virtual viewpoint image （VVI） in free-viewpoint television system （FFV） is proposed in this paper. The key point of the proposed metric is taking resemblant information between VVI and its neighbor view images for quality assessment to make our metric to be extended to multi-semi-reference image quality assessment easily. The proposed metric first extracts impact factors from image features, then combines an image synthesis technique and similarity functions, in which, disparity information are taken into account for registering the resemblant regions. Experiments are divided into three phases. Phase I is to verify the validation of the proposed metric by taking impaired images and original reference into account. The experimental results show the agreement between evaluation scores and bio-characteristic of human visual system. Phase II shows the accordance with Phase I by taking neighbor view as reference. The proposed metric can be taken as a full reference one to evaluate the image quality even though the original reference is absent. Phase III is then performed to evaluate the quality of WI. Evaluation scores in the experimental results are able to evaluate the quality of VVI.展开更多
AIM: To compare the effect of oral erythromycin vs no preparation with prokinetics on the transit time and the image quality of capsule endoscopy (CE) in evaluating small bowel (SB) pathology. METHODS: We conducted a ...AIM: To compare the effect of oral erythromycin vs no preparation with prokinetics on the transit time and the image quality of capsule endoscopy (CE) in evaluating small bowel (SB) pathology. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective, blinded (to the type of preparation) review of 100 CE studies, 50 with no preparation with prokinetics from one medical center (Group A) and 50 from another center with administration of a single dose of 200 mg oral erythromycin 1 h prior to CE (Group B). Gastric, SB and total transit times were calculated, the presence of bile in the duodenum was scored, as was cleanliness within the proximal, middle and distal intestine. RESULTS: The erythromycin group had a slightly shorter gastric transit time (21 min vs 28 min, with no statistical significance). SB transit time was similar for both groups (all P > 0.05). Total transit time was almost identical in both groups. The rate of incomplete examination was 16% for Group A and 10% for Group B (P = 0.37). Bile and cleanliness scores in different parts of the intestine were similar for the two groups (P > 0.05). CONCLUSION: Preparation for capsule endoscopy with erythromycin does not affect SB or total transit time. It tends to reduce gastric transit time, but it does not increase the cecum-reaching rate. Erythromycin does not adversely affect image quality. We consider the routine use of oral erythromycin preparation as being unjustified, although it might be considered in patients with known prolonged gastric emptying time.展开更多
Objective To retrospectively evaluate the effects of saline administration following contrast material injection, abdominal compression and two delay phase acquisition on image quality improvement of computed tomograp...Objective To retrospectively evaluate the effects of saline administration following contrast material injection, abdominal compression and two delay phase acquisition on image quality improvement of computed tomographic urography (CTU). Methods Medical records and informed consents of patients were obtained. In totally 122 patients (50 men, 72 women), two delay phase images with CTU were performed. Scans began simultaneously with a contrast bolus injection of 100 mL (300 mgI/mL) followed by a saline bolus injection of 100 mL at a rate of 5 mL/s. Two delay phase images were taken at 400 and 550 seconds for each patient. Examinations were taken by using abdominal compression or not. The distention and opacification of the urinary tract were evaluated by two interpreters together on transverse images and post-processing images. Effects of four techniques (saline administration and abdominal compression, saline administration only, compression only, and neither saline administration nor compression) and two delay phase acquisition on image quality improvement were analysed by using ANOVA and Chi-square test. Results Saline administration improved opacification (P<0.05) and increased overall image quality (P<0.01) of the intrarenal collecting system and proximal ureter. Abdominal compression (P<0.05) and delayed phase image acquisition of 550 seconds (P<0.01) all improved distention of the intrarenal collecting system and proximal ureter but did not improve opacification. No statistically significant effects on the distal ureter were found. However, there were more visualized distal ureteral segments with the longer imaging delay. Conclusion Saline administration, abdominal compression and longer imaging delays are all effective in improving image quality of 64-detector row CTU.展开更多
In this paper,a new approach is proposed to determine whether the content of an image is authentic or modified with a focus on detecting complex image tampering.Detecting image tampering without any prior information ...In this paper,a new approach is proposed to determine whether the content of an image is authentic or modified with a focus on detecting complex image tampering.Detecting image tampering without any prior information of the original image is a challenging problem since unknown diverse manipulations may have different characteristics and so do various formats of images.Our principle is that image processing,no matter how complex,may affect image quality,so image quality metrics can be used to distinguish tampered images.In particular,based on the alteration of image quality in modified blocks,the proposed method can locate the tampered areas.Referring to four types of effective no-reference image quality metrics,we obtain 13 features to present an image.The experimental results show that the proposed method is very promising on detecting image tampering and locating the locally tampered areas especially in realistic scenarios.展开更多
Blind image quality assessment(BIQA)is of fundamental importance in low-level computer vision community.Increasing interest has been drawn in exploiting deep neural networks for BIQA.Despite of the notable success ach...Blind image quality assessment(BIQA)is of fundamental importance in low-level computer vision community.Increasing interest has been drawn in exploiting deep neural networks for BIQA.Despite of the notable success achieved,there is a broad consensus that training deep convolutional neural networks(DCNN)heavily relies on massive annotated data.Unfortunately,BIQA is typically a small sample problem,resulting the generalization ability of BIQA severely restricted.In order to improve the accuracy and generalization ability of BIQA metrics,this work proposed a totally opinion-unaware BIQA in which no subjective annotations are involved in the training stage.Multiple full-reference image quality assessment(FR-IQA)metrics are employed to label the distorted image as a substitution of subjective quality annotation.A deep neural network(DNN)is trained to blindly predict the multiple FR-IQA score in absence of corresponding pristine image.In the end,a selfsupervised FR-IQA score aggregator implemented by adversarial auto-encoder pools the predictions of multiple FR-IQA scores into the final quality predicting score.Even though none of subjective scores are involved in the training stage,experimental results indicate that our proposed full reference induced BIQA framework is as competitive as state-of-the-art BIQA metrics.展开更多
It is well-known that classical quality measures,such as Mean Squared Error(MSE),Weighted Mean Squared Error(WMSE)or Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio(PSNR),are not always corresponding with visual observations.Structural si...It is well-known that classical quality measures,such as Mean Squared Error(MSE),Weighted Mean Squared Error(WMSE)or Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio(PSNR),are not always corresponding with visual observations.Structural similarity based image quality assessment was proposed under the assumption that the Human Visual System(HVS)is highly adapted for extracting structural information from an image.While the demand on high color quality increases in the media industry,color loss will make the visual quality different.In this paper,we proposed an improved quality assessment(QA)method by adding color comparison into the structural similarity(SSIM)measurement system for evaluating color image quality.Then we divided the task of similarity measurement into four comparisons:luminance,contrast,structure,and color.Experimental results show that the predicted quality scores of the proposed method are more effective and consistent with visual quality than the classical methods using five different distortion types of color image sets.展开更多
Image quality assessment(IQA)is constantly innovating,but there are still three types of stickers that have not been resolved:the“content sticker”-limitation of training set,the“annotation sticker”-subjective inst...Image quality assessment(IQA)is constantly innovating,but there are still three types of stickers that have not been resolved:the“content sticker”-limitation of training set,the“annotation sticker”-subjective instability in opinion scores and the“distortion sticker”-disordered distortion settings.In this paper,a No-Reference Image Quality Assessment(NR IQA)approach is proposed to deal with the problems.For“content sticker”,we introduce the idea of pairwise comparison and generate a largescale ranking set to pre-train the network;For“annotation sticker”,the absolute noise-containing subjective scores are transformed into ranking comparison results,and we design an indirect unsupervised regression based on EigenValue Decomposition(EVD);For“distortion sticker”,we propose a perception-based distortion classification method,which makes the distortion types clear and refined.Experiments have proved that our NR IQA approach Experiments show that the algorithm performs well and has good generalization ability.Furthermore,the proposed perception based distortion classification method would be able to provide insights on how the visual related studies may be developed and to broaden our understanding of human visual system.展开更多
Most of Image Quality Assessment (IQA) metrics consist of two processes. In the first process, quality map of image is measured locally. In the second process, the last quality score is converted from the quality map ...Most of Image Quality Assessment (IQA) metrics consist of two processes. In the first process, quality map of image is measured locally. In the second process, the last quality score is converted from the quality map by using the pooling strategy. The first process had been made effective and significant progresses, while the second process was always done in simple ways. In the second process of the pooling strategy, the optimal perceptual pooling weights should be determined and computed according to Human Visual System (HVS). Thus, a reliable spatial pooling mathematical model based on HVS is an important issue worthy of study. In this paper, a new Visual Perceptual Pooling Strategy (VPPS) for IQA is presented based on contrast sensitivity and luminance sensitivity of HVS. Experimental results with the LIVE database show that the visual perceptual weights, obtained by the proposed pooling strategy, can effectively and significantly improve the performances of the IQA metrics with Mean Structural SIMilarity (MSSIM) or Phase Quantization Code (PQC). It is confirmed that the proposed VPPS demonstrates promising results for improving the performances of existing IQA metrics.展开更多
Based on compressive sampling transmission model, we demonstrate here a method of quality evaluation for the reconstruction images, which is promising for the transmission of unstructured signal with reduced dimension...Based on compressive sampling transmission model, we demonstrate here a method of quality evaluation for the reconstruction images, which is promising for the transmission of unstructured signal with reduced dimension. By this method, the auxiliary information of the recovery image quality is obtained as a feedback to control number of measurements from compressive sampling video stream. Therefore, the number of measurements can be easily derived at the condition of the absence of information sparsity, and the recovery image quality is effectively improved. Theoretical and experimental results show that this algorithm can estimate the quality of images effectively and is in well consistency with the traditional objective evaluation algorithm.展开更多
Traditional image quality assessment methods use the hand-crafted features to predict the image quality score,which cannot perform well in many scenes.Since deep learning promotes the development of many computer visi...Traditional image quality assessment methods use the hand-crafted features to predict the image quality score,which cannot perform well in many scenes.Since deep learning promotes the development of many computer vision tasks,many IQA methods start to utilize the deep convolutional neural networks(CNN)for IQA task.In this paper,a CNN-based multi-scale blind image quality predictor is proposed to extract more effectivity multi-scale distortion features through the pyramidal convolution,which consists of two tasks:A distortion recognition task and a quality regression task.For the first task,image distortion type is obtained by the fully connected layer.For the second task,the image quality score is predicted during the distortion recognition progress.Experimental results on three famous IQA datasets show that the proposed method has better performance than the previous traditional algorithms for quality prediction and distortion recognition.展开更多
In order to apply the deep learning to the stereo image quality evaluation,two problems need to be solved:The first one is that we have a bit of training samples,another is how to input the dimensional image’s left v...In order to apply the deep learning to the stereo image quality evaluation,two problems need to be solved:The first one is that we have a bit of training samples,another is how to input the dimensional image’s left view or right view.In this paper,we transfer the 2D image quality evaluation model to the stereo image quality evaluation,and this method solves the first problem;use the method of principal component analysis is used to fuse the left and right views into an input image in order to solve the second problem.At the same time,the input image is preprocessed by phase congruency transformation,which further improves the performance of the algorithm.The structure of the deep convolution neural network consists of four convolution layers and three maximum pooling layers and two fully connected layers.The experimental results on LIVE3D image database show that the prediction quality score of the model is in good agreement with the subjective evaluation value.展开更多
Objective image quality assessment(IQA)plays an important role in various visual communication systems,which can automatically and efficiently predict the perceived quality of images.The human eye is the ultimate eval...Objective image quality assessment(IQA)plays an important role in various visual communication systems,which can automatically and efficiently predict the perceived quality of images.The human eye is the ultimate evaluator for visual experience,thus the modeling of human visual system(HVS)is a core issue for objective IQA and visual experience optimization.The traditional model based on black box fitting has low interpretability and it is difficult to guide the experience optimization effectively,while the model based on physiological simulation is hard to integrate into practical visual communication services due to its high computational complexity.For bridging the gap between signal distortion and visual experience,in this paper,we propose a novel perceptual no-reference(NR)IQA algorithm based on structural computational modeling of HVS.According to the mechanism of the human brain,we divide the visual signal processing into a low-level visual layer,a middle-level visual layer and a high-level visual layer,which conduct pixel information processing,primitive information processing and global image information processing,respectively.The natural scene statistics(NSS)based features,deep features and free-energy based features are extracted from these three layers.The support vector regression(SVR)is employed to aggregate features to the final quality prediction.Extensive experimental comparisons on three widely used benchmark IQA databases(LIVE,CSIQ and TID2013)demonstrate that our proposed metric is highly competitive with or outperforms the state-of-the-art NR IQA measures.展开更多
The bandwidth of internet connections is still a bottleneck when transmitting large amounts of images,making the image quality assessment essential.Neurophysiological assessment of image quality has highlight advantag...The bandwidth of internet connections is still a bottleneck when transmitting large amounts of images,making the image quality assessment essential.Neurophysiological assessment of image quality has highlight advantages for it does not interfere with natural viewing behavior.However,in JPEG compression,the previous study is hard to tell the difference between the electroencephalogram(EEG)evoked by different quality images.In this paper,we propose an EEG analysis approach based on algebraic topology analysis,and the result shows that the difference between Euler characteristics of EEG evoked by different distortion images is striking both in the alpha and beta band.Moreover,we further discuss the relationship between the images and the EEG signals,and the results implied that the algebraic topological properties of images are consistent with that of brain perception,which is possible to give birth to braininspired image compression based on algebraic topological features.In general,an algebraic topologybased approach was proposed in this paper to analyze the perceptual characteristics of image quality,which will be beneficial to provide a reliable score for data compression in the network and improve the network transmission capacity.展开更多
The evaluation of geometric calibration accuracy of high resolution satellite images has been increasingly recognized in recent years.In order to evaluate geometric accuracy for dual-camera satellite images based on t...The evaluation of geometric calibration accuracy of high resolution satellite images has been increasingly recognized in recent years.In order to evaluate geometric accuracy for dual-camera satellite images based on the ground control points(GCP),a rigorous geometric imaging model,which was based on the collinear equation of the probe directional angle and the optimized tri-axial attitude determination(TRIAD)algorithm,is presented.Two reliable test fields in Tianjin and Jinan(China)were utilized for geometric accuracy validation of Pakistan Remote Sensing Satellite-1.The experimental results demonstrate a certain deviation of the on-orbit calibration result from the initial design values of the calibration parameters.Therefore,on-orbit geometric calibration is necessary for optical satellite imagery.Within this research,the geometrical performances including positioning accuracy without/with GCP and band registration of the dual-camera satellite were analyzed in detail,and the results of geometric image quality are assessed and discussed.As a result,it is feasible and necessary to establish such a geometric calibration model to evaluate the geometric quality of dual-camera satellite.展开更多
Visual inspection of the key components of nuclear power plants(NPPs)is important for NPP operation and maintenance. However,the underwater environment and existing radiation will lead to image degradation,thus making...Visual inspection of the key components of nuclear power plants(NPPs)is important for NPP operation and maintenance. However,the underwater environment and existing radiation will lead to image degradation,thus making it difficult to identify surface defects. In this study,a method for improving the quality of underwater images is proposed.By analyzing the degradation characteristics of underwater detection image,the image enhancement technology is used to improve the color richness of the image,and then the improved dark channel prior(DCP)algorithm is used to restore it. By modifying the estimation formula of transmittance and background light,the correction of insufficient brightness in DCP restored image is realized. The proposed method is compared with other state-of-the-art methods. The results show that the proposed method can achieve higher scores and improve the image quality by correcting the color and restoring local details,thus effectively enhancing the reliability of visual inspection of NPPs.展开更多
基金supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF)under Grant RS-2022-NR-069955(2022R1A2C1092178).
文摘Previous research utilizing Cartoon Generative Adversarial Network(CartoonGAN)has encountered limitations in managing intricate outlines and accurately representing lighting effects,particularly in complex scenes requiring detailed shading and contrast.This paper presents a novel Enhanced Pixel Integration(EPI)technique designed to improve the visual quality of images generated by CartoonGAN.Rather than modifying the core model,the EPI approach employs post-processing adjustments that enhance images without significant computational overhead.In this method,images produced by CartoonGAN are converted from Red-Green-Blue(RGB)to Hue-Saturation-Value(HSV)format,allowing for precise adjustments in hue,saturation,and brightness,thereby improving color fidelity.Specific correction values are applied to fine-tune colors,ensuring they closely match the original input while maintaining the characteristic,stylized effect of CartoonGAN.The corrected images are blended with the originals to retain aesthetic appeal and visual distinctiveness,resulting in improved color accuracy and overall coherence.Experimental results demonstrate that EPI significantly increases similarity to original input images compared to the standard CartoonGAN model,achieving a 40.14%enhancement in visual similarity in Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity(LPIPS),a 30.21%improvement in structural consistency in Structural Similarity Index Measure(SSIM),and an 11.81%reduction in pixel-level error in Mean Squared Error(MSE).By addressing limitations present in the traditional CartoonGAN pipeline,EPI offers practical enhancements for creative applications,particularly within media and design fields where visual fidelity and artistic style preservation are critical.These improvements align with the goals of Fog and Edge Computing,which also seek to enhance processing efficiency and application performance in sensitive industries such as healthcare,logistics,and education.This research not only resolves key deficiencies in existing CartoonGAN models but also expands its potential applications in image-based content creation,bridging gaps between technical constraints and creative demands.Future studies may explore the adaptability of EPI across various datasets and artistic styles,potentially broadening its impact on visual transformation tasks.
基金supported by the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University Teaching Reform Project(Grant No.JG2023-0206 and JG2022-0324).
文摘Objective:In the Radiology Department of Mzuzu Central Hospital(MCH),daily training for radiographers now includes content on Computed Tomography(CT)image quality control and equipment maintenance to ensure the normal,continuous,and stable operation of the 16-slice spiral CT scanner.Methods:Through comprehensive analysis of relevant equipment,we have identified key parameters that significantly impact CT image quality.Innovative optimization strategies and solutions targeting these parameters have been developed and integrated into daily training programs.Furthermore,starting from an examination of prevalent failure modes observed in CT equipment,we delve into essential maintenance and preservation techniques that CT technologists must master to ensure optimal system performance.Results:(1)Crucial factors affecting CT image quality include artifacts,noise,partial volume effects,and surrounding gap phenomena,alongside spatial and density resolutions,CT dose,reconstruction algorithms,and human factors during the scanning process.In the daily training for radiographers,emphasis is placed on strictly implementing image quality control measures at every stage of the CT scanning process and skillfully applying advanced scanning and image processing techniques.By doing so,we can provide clinicians with accurate and reliable imaging references for diagnosis and treatment.(2)Strategies for CT equipment maintenance:①Environmental inspection of the CT room to ensure cleanliness and hygiene.②Rational and accurate operation,including calibration software proficiency.③Regular maintenance and servicing for minimizing machine downtime.④Maintenance of the CT X-ray tube.CT technicians can become proficient in equipment maintenance and upkeep techniques through training,which can significantly extend the service life of CT systems and reduce the occurrence of malfunctions.Conclusion:Through the regular implementation of rigorous CT image quality control training for radiology technicians,coupled with diligent and proactive CT equipment maintenance,we have observed profound and beneficial impacts on improving image quality.The accuracy and fidelity of radiological data ultimately leads to more accurate diagnoses and effective treatments.
基金supported by the Medium and Long-term Science and Technology Plan for Radio,Television,and Online Audiovisuals(2023AC0200)the Public Welfare Technology Application Research Project of Zhejiang Province,China(No.LGF21F010001).
文摘Recent deep neural network(DNN)based blind image quality assessment(BIQA)approaches take mean opinion score(MOS)as ground-truth labels,which would lead to cross-datasets biases and limited generalization ability of the DNN-based BIQA model.This work validates the natural instability of MOS through investigating the neuropsychological characteristics inside the human visual system during quality perception.By combining persistent homology analysis with electroencephalogram(EEG),the physiologically meaningful features of the brain responses to different distortion levels are extracted.The physiological features indicate that although volunteers view exactly the same image content,their EEG features are quite varied.Based on the physiological results,we advocate treating MOS as noisy labels and optimizing the DNN based BIQA model with earlystop strategies.Experimental results on both innerdataset and cross-dataset demonstrate the superiority of our optimization approach in terms of generalization ability.
基金supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.
文摘Most blind image quality assessment(BIQA)methods require a large amount of time to collect human opinion scores as training labels,which limits their usability in practice.Thus,we present an opinion-unaware BIQA method based on deep reinforcement learning which is trained without subjective scores,named DRL-IQA.Inspired by the human visual perception process,our model is formulated as a quality reinforced agent,which consists of the dynamic distortion generation part and the quality perception part.By considering the image distortion degradation process as a sequential decision-making process,the dynamic distortion generation part can develop a strategy to add as many different distortions as possible to an image,which enriches the distortion space to alleviate overfitting.A reward function calculated from quality degradation after adding distortion is utilized to continuously optimize the strategy.Furthermore,the quality perception part can extract rich quality features from the quality degradation process without using subjective scores,and accurately predict the state values that represent the image quality.Experimental results reveal that our method achieves competitive quality prediction performance compared to other state-of-the-art BIQA methods.
基金The National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.81272501)the National Basic Research Program of China(973Program)(No.2011CB707904)Taishan Scholars Program of Shandong Province,China(No.ts20120505)
文摘To further explore the human visual system（ HVS）,the perceptual grouping（ PG）, which has been proven to play an important role in the HVS, is adopted to design an effective image quality assessment（ IQA） model. Compared with the existing fixed-window-based models, the proposed one is an adaptive window-like model that introduces the perceptual grouping strategy into the IQA model. It works as follows： first,it preprocesses the images by clustering similar pixels into a group to the greatest extent; then the structural similarity is used to compute the similarity of the superpixels between reference and distorted images; finally, it integrates all the similarity of superpixels of an image to yield a quality score. Experimental results on three databases（ LIVE, IVC and MICT） showthat the proposed method yields good performance in terms of correlation with human judgments of visual quality.
基金Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 60672073,60872094)the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-06-0537)the Natural Science Foundation of Ningbo (No. 2007A610037).
文摘A semi-reference image quality assessment metric based on similarity measurement for synthesized virtual viewpoint image （VVI） in free-viewpoint television system （FFV） is proposed in this paper. The key point of the proposed metric is taking resemblant information between VVI and its neighbor view images for quality assessment to make our metric to be extended to multi-semi-reference image quality assessment easily. The proposed metric first extracts impact factors from image features, then combines an image synthesis technique and similarity functions, in which, disparity information are taken into account for registering the resemblant regions. Experiments are divided into three phases. Phase I is to verify the validation of the proposed metric by taking impaired images and original reference into account. The experimental results show the agreement between evaluation scores and bio-characteristic of human visual system. Phase II shows the accordance with Phase I by taking neighbor view as reference. The proposed metric can be taken as a full reference one to evaluate the image quality even though the original reference is absent. Phase III is then performed to evaluate the quality of WI. Evaluation scores in the experimental results are able to evaluate the quality of VVI.
文摘AIM: To compare the effect of oral erythromycin vs no preparation with prokinetics on the transit time and the image quality of capsule endoscopy (CE) in evaluating small bowel (SB) pathology. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective, blinded (to the type of preparation) review of 100 CE studies, 50 with no preparation with prokinetics from one medical center (Group A) and 50 from another center with administration of a single dose of 200 mg oral erythromycin 1 h prior to CE (Group B). Gastric, SB and total transit times were calculated, the presence of bile in the duodenum was scored, as was cleanliness within the proximal, middle and distal intestine. RESULTS: The erythromycin group had a slightly shorter gastric transit time (21 min vs 28 min, with no statistical significance). SB transit time was similar for both groups (all P > 0.05). Total transit time was almost identical in both groups. The rate of incomplete examination was 16% for Group A and 10% for Group B (P = 0.37). Bile and cleanliness scores in different parts of the intestine were similar for the two groups (P > 0.05). CONCLUSION: Preparation for capsule endoscopy with erythromycin does not affect SB or total transit time. It tends to reduce gastric transit time, but it does not increase the cecum-reaching rate. Erythromycin does not adversely affect image quality. We consider the routine use of oral erythromycin preparation as being unjustified, although it might be considered in patients with known prolonged gastric emptying time.
文摘Objective To retrospectively evaluate the effects of saline administration following contrast material injection, abdominal compression and two delay phase acquisition on image quality improvement of computed tomographic urography (CTU). Methods Medical records and informed consents of patients were obtained. In totally 122 patients (50 men, 72 women), two delay phase images with CTU were performed. Scans began simultaneously with a contrast bolus injection of 100 mL (300 mgI/mL) followed by a saline bolus injection of 100 mL at a rate of 5 mL/s. Two delay phase images were taken at 400 and 550 seconds for each patient. Examinations were taken by using abdominal compression or not. The distention and opacification of the urinary tract were evaluated by two interpreters together on transverse images and post-processing images. Effects of four techniques (saline administration and abdominal compression, saline administration only, compression only, and neither saline administration nor compression) and two delay phase acquisition on image quality improvement were analysed by using ANOVA and Chi-square test. Results Saline administration improved opacification (P<0.05) and increased overall image quality (P<0.01) of the intrarenal collecting system and proximal ureter. Abdominal compression (P<0.05) and delayed phase image acquisition of 550 seconds (P<0.01) all improved distention of the intrarenal collecting system and proximal ureter but did not improve opacification. No statistically significant effects on the distal ureter were found. However, there were more visualized distal ureteral segments with the longer imaging delay. Conclusion Saline administration, abdominal compression and longer imaging delays are all effective in improving image quality of 64-detector row CTU.
基金Sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant No.60971095 and No.61172109)Artificial Intelligence Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province(Grant No.2012RZJ01)the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities(Grant No.DUT13RC201)
文摘In this paper,a new approach is proposed to determine whether the content of an image is authentic or modified with a focus on detecting complex image tampering.Detecting image tampering without any prior information of the original image is a challenging problem since unknown diverse manipulations may have different characteristics and so do various formats of images.Our principle is that image processing,no matter how complex,may affect image quality,so image quality metrics can be used to distinguish tampered images.In particular,based on the alteration of image quality in modified blocks,the proposed method can locate the tampered areas.Referring to four types of effective no-reference image quality metrics,we obtain 13 features to present an image.The experimental results show that the proposed method is very promising on detecting image tampering and locating the locally tampered areas especially in realistic scenarios.
基金supported by the Public Welfare Technology Application Research Project of Zhejiang Province,China(No.LGF21F010001)the Key Research and Development Program of Zhejiang Province,China(Grant No.2019C01002)the Key Research and Development Program of Zhejiang Province,China(Grant No.2021C03138)。
文摘Blind image quality assessment(BIQA)is of fundamental importance in low-level computer vision community.Increasing interest has been drawn in exploiting deep neural networks for BIQA.Despite of the notable success achieved,there is a broad consensus that training deep convolutional neural networks(DCNN)heavily relies on massive annotated data.Unfortunately,BIQA is typically a small sample problem,resulting the generalization ability of BIQA severely restricted.In order to improve the accuracy and generalization ability of BIQA metrics,this work proposed a totally opinion-unaware BIQA in which no subjective annotations are involved in the training stage.Multiple full-reference image quality assessment(FR-IQA)metrics are employed to label the distorted image as a substitution of subjective quality annotation.A deep neural network(DNN)is trained to blindly predict the multiple FR-IQA score in absence of corresponding pristine image.In the end,a selfsupervised FR-IQA score aggregator implemented by adversarial auto-encoder pools the predictions of multiple FR-IQA scores into the final quality predicting score.Even though none of subjective scores are involved in the training stage,experimental results indicate that our proposed full reference induced BIQA framework is as competitive as state-of-the-art BIQA metrics.
文摘It is well-known that classical quality measures,such as Mean Squared Error(MSE),Weighted Mean Squared Error(WMSE)or Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio(PSNR),are not always corresponding with visual observations.Structural similarity based image quality assessment was proposed under the assumption that the Human Visual System(HVS)is highly adapted for extracting structural information from an image.While the demand on high color quality increases in the media industry,color loss will make the visual quality different.In this paper,we proposed an improved quality assessment(QA)method by adding color comparison into the structural similarity(SSIM)measurement system for evaluating color image quality.Then we divided the task of similarity measurement into four comparisons:luminance,contrast,structure,and color.Experimental results show that the predicted quality scores of the proposed method are more effective and consistent with visual quality than the classical methods using five different distortion types of color image sets.
基金supported by the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China, "Research of Visual Perception for Impairments of Color Information in High-Definition Images" (No.20110018110001)
文摘Image quality assessment(IQA)is constantly innovating,but there are still three types of stickers that have not been resolved:the“content sticker”-limitation of training set,the“annotation sticker”-subjective instability in opinion scores and the“distortion sticker”-disordered distortion settings.In this paper,a No-Reference Image Quality Assessment(NR IQA)approach is proposed to deal with the problems.For“content sticker”,we introduce the idea of pairwise comparison and generate a largescale ranking set to pre-train the network;For“annotation sticker”,the absolute noise-containing subjective scores are transformed into ranking comparison results,and we design an indirect unsupervised regression based on EigenValue Decomposition(EVD);For“distortion sticker”,we propose a perception-based distortion classification method,which makes the distortion types clear and refined.Experiments have proved that our NR IQA approach Experiments show that the algorithm performs well and has good generalization ability.Furthermore,the proposed perception based distortion classification method would be able to provide insights on how the visual related studies may be developed and to broaden our understanding of human visual system.
基金Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 60832003, 60902096, 61171163, 61071120)the Scientific Research Foundation of Graduate School of Ningbo University
文摘Most of Image Quality Assessment (IQA) metrics consist of two processes. In the first process, quality map of image is measured locally. In the second process, the last quality score is converted from the quality map by using the pooling strategy. The first process had been made effective and significant progresses, while the second process was always done in simple ways. In the second process of the pooling strategy, the optimal perceptual pooling weights should be determined and computed according to Human Visual System (HVS). Thus, a reliable spatial pooling mathematical model based on HVS is an important issue worthy of study. In this paper, a new Visual Perceptual Pooling Strategy (VPPS) for IQA is presented based on contrast sensitivity and luminance sensitivity of HVS. Experimental results with the LIVE database show that the visual perceptual weights, obtained by the proposed pooling strategy, can effectively and significantly improve the performances of the IQA metrics with Mean Structural SIMilarity (MSSIM) or Phase Quantization Code (PQC). It is confirmed that the proposed VPPS demonstrates promising results for improving the performances of existing IQA metrics.
基金Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 60972039)Jiangsu Province Natural Science Fund Project (BK2010077)Innovation Project of SCI & Tech for College Graduates of Jiangsu Province(CXLX12 _0475)
文摘Based on compressive sampling transmission model, we demonstrate here a method of quality evaluation for the reconstruction images, which is promising for the transmission of unstructured signal with reduced dimension. By this method, the auxiliary information of the recovery image quality is obtained as a feedback to control number of measurements from compressive sampling video stream. Therefore, the number of measurements can be easily derived at the condition of the absence of information sparsity, and the recovery image quality is effectively improved. Theoretical and experimental results show that this algorithm can estimate the quality of images effectively and is in well consistency with the traditional objective evaluation algorithm.
文摘Traditional image quality assessment methods use the hand-crafted features to predict the image quality score,which cannot perform well in many scenes.Since deep learning promotes the development of many computer vision tasks,many IQA methods start to utilize the deep convolutional neural networks(CNN)for IQA task.In this paper,a CNN-based multi-scale blind image quality predictor is proposed to extract more effectivity multi-scale distortion features through the pyramidal convolution,which consists of two tasks:A distortion recognition task and a quality regression task.For the first task,image distortion type is obtained by the fully connected layer.For the second task,the image quality score is predicted during the distortion recognition progress.Experimental results on three famous IQA datasets show that the proposed method has better performance than the previous traditional algorithms for quality prediction and distortion recognition.
文摘In order to apply the deep learning to the stereo image quality evaluation,two problems need to be solved:The first one is that we have a bit of training samples,another is how to input the dimensional image’s left view or right view.In this paper,we transfer the 2D image quality evaluation model to the stereo image quality evaluation,and this method solves the first problem;use the method of principal component analysis is used to fuse the left and right views into an input image in order to solve the second problem.At the same time,the input image is preprocessed by phase congruency transformation,which further improves the performance of the algorithm.The structure of the deep convolution neural network consists of four convolution layers and three maximum pooling layers and two fully connected layers.The experimental results on LIVE3D image database show that the prediction quality score of the model is in good agreement with the subjective evaluation value.
基金This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China(Nos.61831015 and 61901260)Key Research and Development Program of China(No.2019YFB1405902).
文摘Objective image quality assessment(IQA)plays an important role in various visual communication systems,which can automatically and efficiently predict the perceived quality of images.The human eye is the ultimate evaluator for visual experience,thus the modeling of human visual system(HVS)is a core issue for objective IQA and visual experience optimization.The traditional model based on black box fitting has low interpretability and it is difficult to guide the experience optimization effectively,while the model based on physiological simulation is hard to integrate into practical visual communication services due to its high computational complexity.For bridging the gap between signal distortion and visual experience,in this paper,we propose a novel perceptual no-reference(NR)IQA algorithm based on structural computational modeling of HVS.According to the mechanism of the human brain,we divide the visual signal processing into a low-level visual layer,a middle-level visual layer and a high-level visual layer,which conduct pixel information processing,primitive information processing and global image information processing,respectively.The natural scene statistics(NSS)based features,deep features and free-energy based features are extracted from these three layers.The support vector regression(SVR)is employed to aggregate features to the final quality prediction.Extensive experimental comparisons on three widely used benchmark IQA databases(LIVE,CSIQ and TID2013)demonstrate that our proposed metric is highly competitive with or outperforms the state-of-the-art NR IQA measures.
基金supported by the Key Research and Development Program of Zhejiang Province(Grant No.2019C03138 and No.2019C01002)。
文摘The bandwidth of internet connections is still a bottleneck when transmitting large amounts of images,making the image quality assessment essential.Neurophysiological assessment of image quality has highlight advantages for it does not interfere with natural viewing behavior.However,in JPEG compression,the previous study is hard to tell the difference between the electroencephalogram(EEG)evoked by different quality images.In this paper,we propose an EEG analysis approach based on algebraic topology analysis,and the result shows that the difference between Euler characteristics of EEG evoked by different distortion images is striking both in the alpha and beta band.Moreover,we further discuss the relationship between the images and the EEG signals,and the results implied that the algebraic topological properties of images are consistent with that of brain perception,which is possible to give birth to braininspired image compression based on algebraic topological features.In general,an algebraic topologybased approach was proposed in this paper to analyze the perceptual characteristics of image quality,which will be beneficial to provide a reliable score for data compression in the network and improve the network transmission capacity.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.41801291)。
文摘The evaluation of geometric calibration accuracy of high resolution satellite images has been increasingly recognized in recent years.In order to evaluate geometric accuracy for dual-camera satellite images based on the ground control points(GCP),a rigorous geometric imaging model,which was based on the collinear equation of the probe directional angle and the optimized tri-axial attitude determination(TRIAD)algorithm,is presented.Two reliable test fields in Tianjin and Jinan(China)were utilized for geometric accuracy validation of Pakistan Remote Sensing Satellite-1.The experimental results demonstrate a certain deviation of the on-orbit calibration result from the initial design values of the calibration parameters.Therefore,on-orbit geometric calibration is necessary for optical satellite imagery.Within this research,the geometrical performances including positioning accuracy without/with GCP and band registration of the dual-camera satellite were analyzed in detail,and the results of geometric image quality are assessed and discussed.As a result,it is feasible and necessary to establish such a geometric calibration model to evaluate the geometric quality of dual-camera satellite.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundations of China (Nos. 51674031,51874022)。
文摘Visual inspection of the key components of nuclear power plants(NPPs)is important for NPP operation and maintenance. However,the underwater environment and existing radiation will lead to image degradation,thus making it difficult to identify surface defects. In this study,a method for improving the quality of underwater images is proposed.By analyzing the degradation characteristics of underwater detection image,the image enhancement technology is used to improve the color richness of the image,and then the improved dark channel prior(DCP)algorithm is used to restore it. By modifying the estimation formula of transmittance and background light,the correction of insufficient brightness in DCP restored image is realized. The proposed method is compared with other state-of-the-art methods. The results show that the proposed method can achieve higher scores and improve the image quality by correcting the color and restoring local details,thus effectively enhancing the reliability of visual inspection of NPPs.
