Immersive displays such as VR headsets, AR glasses, Multiview displays, Free point televisions have emerged as a new class of display technologies in recent years, offering a better visual experience and viewer engagement as compared to conventional displays. With the evolution of 3D video and display technologies, the consumer market for High Dynamic Range (HDR) cameras and displays is quickly growing. The lack of appropriate experimental data is a critical hindrance for the development of primary research efforts in the field of 3D HDR video technology. Also, the unavailability of sufficient real world multi-exposure experimental dataset is a major bottleneck for HDR imaging research, thereby limiting the quality of experience (QoE) for the viewers. In this paper, we introduce a diversified stereoscopic multi-exposure dataset captured within the campus of Indian Institute of Technology Madras, which is home to a diverse flora and fauna. The dataset is captured using ZED stereoscopic camera and provides intricate scenes of outdoor locations such as gardens, roadside views, festival venues, buildings and indoor locations such as academic and residential areas. The proposed dataset accommodates wide depth range, complex depth structure, complicate object movement, illumination variations, rich color dynamics, texture discrepancy in addition to significant randomness introduced by moving camera and background motion. The proposed dataset is made publicly available to the research community. Furthermore, the procedure for capturing, aligning and calibrating multi-exposure stereo videos and images is described in detail. Finally, we have discussed the progress, challenges, potential use cases and future research opportunities with respect to HDR imaging, depth estimation, consistent tone mapping and 3D HDR coding.
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
A new stereoscopic image quality assessment database rendered using the 2D-image-plus-depth source, called MCL-3D, is described and the performance benchmarking of several known 2D and 3D image quality metrics using the MCL-3D database is presented in this work. Nine image-plus-depth sources are first selected, and a depth image-based rendering (DIBR) technique is used to render stereoscopic image pairs. Distortions applied to either the texture image or the depth image before stereoscopic image rendering include: Gaussian blur, additive white noise, down-sampling blur, JPEG and JPEG-2000 (JP2…
This paper addresses the problem of blind stereoscopic image quality assessment (NR-SIQA) using a new multi-task deep learning based-method. In the field of stereoscopic vision, the information is fairly distributed between the left and right views as well as the binocular phenomenon. In this work, we propose to integrate these characteristics to estimate the quality of stereoscopic images without reference through a convolutional neural network. Our method is based on two main tasks: the first task predicts naturalness analysis based features adapted to stereo images, while the second task pr…
Depth adjustment aims to enhance the visual experience of stereoscopic 3D (S3D) images, which accompanied with improving visual comfort and depth perception. For a human expert, the depth adjustment procedure is a sequence of iterative decision making. The human expert iteratively adjusts the depth until he is satisfied with the both levels of visual comfort and the perceived depth. In this work, we present a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach for depth adjustment named VCA-RL (Visual Comfort Aware Reinforcement Learning) to explicitly model human sequential decision making…
University of Illinois（伊利诺伊大学）；Microsoft Research New England（微软新英格兰研究院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
We describe a technique that automatically generates plausible depth maps from videos using non-parametric depth sampling. We demonstrate our technique in cases where past methods fail (non-translating cameras and dynamic scenes). Our technique is applicable to single images as well as videos. For videos, we use local motion cues to improve the inferred depth maps, while optical flow is used to ensure temporal depth consistency. For training and evaluation, we use a Kinect-based system to collect a large dataset containing stereoscopic videos with known depths. We show that our depth estimatio…
Deep learning-based quality metrics have recently given significant improvement in Image Quality Assessment (IQA). In the field of stereoscopic vision, information is evenly distributed with slight disparity to the left and right eyes. However, due to asymmetric distortion, the objective quality ratings for the left and right images would differ, necessitating the learning of unique quality indicators for each view. Unlike existing stereoscopic IQA measures which focus mainly on estimating a global human score, we suggest incorporating left, right, and stereoscopic objective scores to extract …
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Microsoft Research New England（微软新英格兰研究院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
We describe a technique that automatically generates plausible depth maps from videos using non-parametric depth sampling. We demonstrate our technique in cases where past methods fail (non-translating cameras and dynamic scenes). Our technique is applicable to single images as well as videos. For videos, we use local motion cues to improve the inferred depth maps, while optical flow is used to ensure temporal depth consistency. For training and evaluation, we use a Kinect-based system to collect a large dataset containing stereoscopic videos with known depths. We show that our depth estimatio…
Perceptual Depth Quality Assessment of Stereoscopic Omnidirectional Images
School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学计算机科学与信息学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学电气与计算机工程系）
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；TELUS Communications Inc.（研科通讯公司）
Over the past decade, many computational saliency prediction models have been proposed for 2D images and videos. Considering that the human visual system has evolved in a natural 3D environment, it is only natural to want to design visual attention models for 3D content. Existing monocular saliency models are not able to accurately predict the attentive regions when applied to 3D image/video content, as they do not incorporate depth information. This paper explores stereoscopic video saliency prediction by exploiting both low-level attributes such as brightness, color, texture, orientation, mo…
The problem of stereoscopic image quality assessment, which finds applications in 3D visual content delivery such as 3DTV, is investigated in this work. Specifically, we propose a new ParaBoost (parallel-boosting) stereoscopic image quality assessment (PBSIQA) system. The system consists of two stages. In the first stage, various distortions are classified into a few types, and individual quality scorers targeting at a specific distortion type are developed. These scorers offer complementary performance in face of a database consisting of heterogeneous distortion types. In the second stage, sc…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Objective quality assessment of stereoscopic omnidirectional images is a challenging problem since it is influenced by multiple aspects such as projection deformation, field of view (FoV) range, binocular vision, visual comfort, etc. Existing studies show that classic 2D or 3D image quality assessment (IQA) metrics are not able to perform well for stereoscopic omnidirectional images. However, very few research works have focused on evaluating the perceptual visual quality of omnidirectional images, especially for stereoscopic omnidirectional images. In this paper, based on the predictive codin…
In this work, we present a camera configuration for acquiring "stereoscopic dark flash" images: a simultaneous stereo pair in which one camera is a conventional RGB sensor, but the other camera is sensitive to near-infrared and near-ultraviolet instead of R and B. When paired with a "dark" flash (i.e., one having near-infrared and near-ultraviolet light, but no visible light) this camera allows us to capture the two images in a flash/no-flash image pair at the same time, all while not disturbing any human subjects or onlookers with a dazzling visible flash. We present a hardware prototype of t…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Cooperative Medianet Innovation Center（未来媒体网络协同创新中心）；University of California at Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
High-speed, high-resolution stereoscopic (H2-Stereo) video allows us to perceive dynamic 3D content at fine granularity. The acquisition of H2-Stereo video, however, remains challenging with commodity cameras. Existing spatial super-resolution or temporal frame interpolation methods provide compromised solutions that lack temporal or spatial details, respectively. To alleviate this problem, we propose a dual camera system, in which one camera captures high-spatial-resolution low-frame-rate (HSR-LFR) videos with rich spatial details, and the other captures low-spatial-resolution high-frame-rate…
Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad（印度理工学院海得拉巴分校）
We present a no reference (NR) quality assessment algorithm for assessing the perceptual quality of natural stereoscopic 3D (S3D) videos. This work is inspired by our finding that the joint statistics of the subband coefficients of motion (optical flow or motion vector magnitude) and depth (disparity map) of natural S3D videos possess a unique signature. Specifically, we empirically show that the joint statistics of the motion and depth subband coefficients of S3D video frames can be modeled accurately using a Bivariate Generalized Gaussian Distribution (BGGD). We then demonstrate that the par…
In this work, we present CCTV-Exposure -- the first CCTV-aware solution to evaluate potential privacy exposure to closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras. The objective was to develop a toolset for quantifying human exposure to CCTV cameras from a privacy perspective. Our novel approach is trajectory analysis of the individuals, coupled with a database of geo-location mapped CCTV cameras annotated with minimal yet sufficient meta-information. For this purpose, CCTV-Exposure model based on a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking was applied to estimate individual privacy exposure in differe…
ESIQA: Perceptual Quality Assessment of Vision-Pro-based Egocentric Spatial Images
Institute of Image Communication and Network Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学图像通信与网络工程研究所）；Institut Universitaire de France (IUF)（法兰西大学研究院）；University of Nantes（南特大学）
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）
Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is an evolving area of research for coherent communication between computers and human beings. Some of the important applications of HCI as reported in literature are face detection, face pose estimation, face tracking and eye gaze estimation. Development of algorithms for these applications is an active field of research. However, availability of standard database to validate such algorithms is insufficient. This paper discusses the creation of such a database created under Near Infra-Red (NIR) illumination. NIR illumination has gained its popularity for night…
A conventional camera performs various signal processing steps sequentially to reconstruct an image from a raw Bayer image. When performing these processing in multiple stages the residual error from each stage accumulates in the image and degrades the quality of the final reconstructed image. In this paper, we present a fully convolutional neural network (CNN) to perform defect pixel correction, denoising, white balancing, exposure correction, demosaicing, color transform, and gamma encoding. To our knowledge, this is the first CNN trained end-to-end to perform the entire image signal process…
Linköping University（林雪平大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Camera sensors can only capture a limited range of luminance simultaneously, and in order to create high dynamic range (HDR) images a set of different exposures are typically combined. In this paper we address the problem of predicting information that have been lost in saturated image areas, in order to enable HDR reconstruction from a single exposure. We show that this problem is well-suited for deep learning algorithms, and propose a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) that is specifically designed taking into account the challenges in predicting HDR values. To train the CNN we gather a…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Advanced Digital Sciences Center（高级数字科学中心）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；ADAPT SFI Research Centre（ADAPT科学基金会研究中心）；Trinity College Dublin（都柏林大学三一学院）
Sky/cloud images obtained from ground-based sky-cameras are usually captured using a fish-eye lens with a wide field of view. However, the sky exhibits a large dynamic range in terms of luminance, more than a conventional camera can capture. It is thus difficult to capture the details of an entire scene with a regular camera in a single shot. In most cases, the circumsolar region is over-exposed, and the regions near the horizon are under-exposed. This renders cloud segmentation for such images difficult. In this paper, we propose HDRCloudSeg -- an effective method for cloud segmentation using…
