Perception-Optimized Encoding for Visually Lossy Image Compression

We propose a compression encoding method to perceptually optimize the image quality based on a novel quality metric, which emulates how the human visual system form opinion of a compressed image. Compared to the existing perceptual-optimized compression methods, which usually aim to minimize the detectability of compression artifacts and are sub-optimal in visually lossless regime, the proposed encoder aims to operate in the visually lossy regime. We implement the proposed encoder within the JPEG 2000 standard, and demonstrate its advantage over both detectability-based and conventional MSE encoders.