This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students. 

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Video deinterlacing is a key technique in digital video processing, particularly with the widespread usage of LCD and plasma TVs. This thesis proposes a novel spatio-temporal, non-linear video deinterlacing technique that adaptively chooses between the results from one dimensional control grid interpolation (1DCGI), vertical temporal filter (VTF) and temporal line

Video deinterlacing is a key technique in digital video processing, particularly with the widespread usage of LCD and plasma TVs. This thesis proposes a novel spatio-temporal, non-linear video deinterlacing technique that adaptively chooses between the results from one dimensional control grid interpolation (1DCGI), vertical temporal filter (VTF) and temporal line averaging (LA). The proposed method performs better than several popular benchmarking methods in terms of both visual quality and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). The algorithm performs better than existing approaches like edge-based line averaging (ELA) and spatio-temporal edge-based median filtering (STELA) on fine moving edges and semi-static regions of videos, which are recognized as particularly challenging deinterlacing cases. The proposed approach also performs better than the state-of-the-art content adaptive vertical temporal filtering (CAVTF) approach. Along with the main approach several spin-off approaches are also proposed each with its own characteristics.
ContributorsVenkatesan, Ragav (Author) / Frakes, David H (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Reisslein, Martin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Visual attention (VA) is the study of mechanisms that allow the human visual system (HVS) to selectively process relevant visual information. This work focuses on the subjective and objective evaluation of computational VA models for the distortion-free case as well as in the presence of image distortions.



Existing VA models are

Visual attention (VA) is the study of mechanisms that allow the human visual system (HVS) to selectively process relevant visual information. This work focuses on the subjective and objective evaluation of computational VA models for the distortion-free case as well as in the presence of image distortions.



Existing VA models are traditionally evaluated by using VA metrics that quantify the match between predicted saliency and fixation data obtained from eye-tracking experiments on human observers. Though there is a considerable number of objective VA metrics, there exists no study that validates that these metrics are adequate for the evaluation of VA models. This work constructs a VA Quality (VAQ) Database by subjectively assessing the prediction performance of VA models on distortion-free images. Additionally, shortcomings in existing metrics are discussed through illustrative examples and a new metric that uses local weights based on fixation density and that overcomes these flaws, is proposed. The proposed VA metric outperforms all other popular existing metrics in terms of the correlation with subjective ratings.



In practice, the image quality is affected by a host of factors at several stages of the image processing pipeline such as acquisition, compression, and transmission. However, none of the existing studies have discussed the subjective and objective evaluation of visual saliency models in the presence of distortion. In this work, a Distortion-based Visual Attention Quality (DVAQ) subjective database is constructed to evaluate the quality of VA maps for images in the presence of distortions. For creating this database, saliency maps obtained from images subjected to various types of distortions, including blur, noise and compression, and varying levels of distortion severity are rated by human observers in terms of their visual resemblance to corresponding ground-truth fixation density maps. The performance of traditionally used as well as recently proposed VA metrics are evaluated by correlating their scores with the human subjective ratings. In addition, an objective evaluation of 20 state-of-the-art VA models is performed using the top-performing VA metrics together with a study of how the VA models’ prediction performance changes with different types and levels of distortions.
ContributorsGide, Milind Subhash (Author) / Karam, Lina J (Thesis advisor) / Abousleman, Glen (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Reisslein, Martin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Blur is an important attribute in the study and modeling of the human visual system. In this work, 3D blur discrimination experiments are conducted to measure the just noticeable additional blur required to differentiate a target blur from the reference blur level. The past studies on blur discrimination have measured

Blur is an important attribute in the study and modeling of the human visual system. In this work, 3D blur discrimination experiments are conducted to measure the just noticeable additional blur required to differentiate a target blur from the reference blur level. The past studies on blur discrimination have measured the sensitivity of the human visual system to blur using 2D test patterns. In this dissertation, subjective tests are performed to measure blur discrimination thresholds using stereoscopic 3D test patterns. The results of this study indicate that, in the symmetric stereo viewing case, binocular disparity does not affect the blur discrimination thresholds for the selected 3D test patterns. In the asymmetric viewing case, the blur discrimination thresholds decreased and the decrease in threshold values is found to be dominated by the eye observing the higher blur.



The second part of the dissertation focuses on texture granularity in the context of 2D images. A texture granularity database referred to as GranTEX, consisting of textures with varying granularity levels is constructed. A subjective study is conducted to measure the perceived granularity level of textures present in the GranTEX database. An objective index that automatically measures the perceived granularity level of textures is also presented. It is shown that the proposed granularity metric correlates well with the subjective granularity scores and outperforms the other methods presented in the literature.

A subjective study is conducted to assess the effect of compression on textures with varying degrees of granularity. A logarithmic function model is proposed as a fit to the subjective test data. It is demonstrated that the proposed model can be used for rate-distortion control by allowing the automatic selection of the needed compression ratio for a target visual quality. The proposed model can also be used for visual quality assessment by providing a measure of the visual quality for a target compression ratio.

The effect of texture granularity on the quality of synthesized textures is studied. A subjective study is presented to assess the quality of synthesized textures with varying levels of texture granularity using different types of texture synthesis methods. This work also proposes a reduced-reference visual quality index referred to as delta texture granularity index for assessing the visual quality of synthesized textures.
ContributorsSubedar, Mahesh M (Author) / Karam, Lina (Thesis advisor) / Abousleman, Glen (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Reisslein, Martin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015