Spatio-Temporal Just Noticeable Distortion Profile for Grey Scale Image/Video in DCT Domain

In image and video processing field, an effective compression algorithm should remove not only the statistical redundancy information but also the perceptually insignificant component from the pictures. Just-noticeable distortion (JND) profile is an efficient model to represent those perceptual redundancies. Human eyes are usually not sensitive to the distortion below the JND threshold. In this paper, a DCT based JND model for monochrome pictures is proposed. This model incorporates the spatial contrast sensitivity function (CSF), the luminance adaptation effect, and the contrast masking effect based on block classification. Gamma correction is also considered to compensate the original luminance adaptation effect which gives more accurate results. In order to extend the proposed JND profile to video images, the temporal modulation factor is included by incorporating the temporal CSF and the eye movement compensation. Moreover, a psychophysical experiment was designed to parameterize the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed model is consistent with the human visual system (HVS). Compared with the other JND profiles, the proposed model can tolerate more distortion and has much better perceptual quality. This model can be easily applied in many related areas, such as compression, watermarking, error protection, perceptual distortion metric, and so on.