Finding best measurable quantities for predicting human visual quality experience

Tuomas Eerola, Joni-Kristian Kämäräinen, Tuomas Leisti, Raisa Halonen, Lasse Lensu, Heikki Kälviäinen, Pirkko Oittinen, Göte Nyman

Abstract: The literature of visual quality is mainly concentrated on devising new physical, visual, or computational quality features which could indirectly reflect ldquotrue visual qualityrdquo. The problem is that the true visual quality is always a subjective and context sensitive judgement of a single individual or a group of individuals. Therefore, the developed methods are only loosely connected to this ultimate objective, and the existing de facto and official standards have been designed by forming a consensus among experts of a specific field (e.g., in the printing industry). In this study, we describe a large psychological experiment where true factors of the human quality experience are pair-wise resolved for dedicatedly selected samples. Then we describe a ranking measure which reveals the relationship between selected measurable quantities and the human evaluation trial. Finally by using the above framework, we devise the best combinations from a set of well-known measurable quantities. The devised combinations can be considered as optimal when agreement with the human visual quality experience is desired, and therefore, they also reveal completely novel information about measuring visual quality.