[...]... Transmission control protocol/internet protocol Video compact disk Video home system Video Quality Experts Group 1 Introduction ‘Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?’ he asked ‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’ Lewis Carroll 1. 1 MOTIVATION Humans are highly visual creatures Evolution has invested a large part of our neurological resources... 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 20 01 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... outward side! William Shakespeare 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 19 96, 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... We will discuss the design of models and metrics and show examples of their utilization The models presented are quite general and may be useful in a variety of image and video processing applications 1. 2 OUTLINE Chapter 2 gives an overview of the human visual system It looks at the anatomy and physiology of its components, explaining the processing of visual information in the brain together with the... masking and channel interactions Chapter 5 is devoted to the evaluation of the prediction performance of the PDM as well as a comparison with competing metrics This is achieved with the help of extensive data from subjective experiments Furthermore, the design choices for the different components of the PDM are analyzed with respect to their influence on prediction performance . Subjective Experiments 10 9 5.2.3 Prediction Performance 11 1 5.2.4 Discussion 11 5 5.3 Component Analysis 11 7 5.3 .1 Dissecting the PDM 11 7 5.3.2 Color Space 11 8 5.3.3 Decomposition Filters 11 9 5.3.4 Pooling. Summary 10 2 5 Metric Evaluation 10 3 5 .1 Still Images 10 3 5 .1. 1 Test Images 10 3 5 .1. 2 Subjective Experiments 10 4 5 .1. 3 Prediction Performance 10 7 vi CONTENTS 5.2 Video 10 8 5.2 .1 Test Sequences 10 8 5.2.2. xiii 1 Introduction 1 1 .1 Motivation 1 1.2 Outline 3 2 Vision 5 2 .1 Eye 5 2 .1. 1 Physical Principles 5 2 .1. 2 Optics of the Eye 7 2 .1. 3 Optical Quality 8 2 .1. 4 Eye Movements 9 2.2 Retina 10 2.2.1