Digital Video Quality: Vision Models and Metrics

Visual quality assessment is an interdisciplinary topic that links image/video processing, psychology and physiology. Many engineers are familiar with the image/video processing; transmission networks side of things but not with the perceptual aspects pertaining to quality.

Digital Video Quality first introduces the concepts of human vision and visual quality. Based on these, specific video quality metrics are developed and their design is presented. These metrics are then evaluated and used in a number of applications, including image/video compression, transmission and watermarking.

• Introduces the concepts of human vision and vision quality.
• Presents the design and development of specific video quality metrics.
• Evaluates video quality metrics in the context of image/video compression, transmission and watermarking.
• Presents tools developed for the analysis of video quality

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 1996, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in 2000 for work on vision modeling and video quality measurement. He 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 2001 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 assistant professor position at the University of Lausanne for a semester. Currently he is Chief Scientist at Genista Corporation.
Dr Winkler has been an invited speaker at numerous technical conferences and seminars. He was organizer of a special session on video quality at VCIP 2003, technical program committee member for ICIP 2004 and WPMC 2004, and has been serving as a reviewer for several scientific journals. He is the author and co-author of over 30 publications on vision modeling and quality assessment.