Objective Evaluation of Components of Colour Distortions due to Image Compression

Amal PUNCHIHEWA  Jonathan ARMSTRONG  Seiichiro HANGAI  Takayuki HAMAMOTO 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences  Vol.E92-A  No.12  pp.3307-3312
Publication Date: 2009/12/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Image Media Quality)
Category: Evaluation
Keyword: 
colour blur,  colour ringing,  image compression,  colour distortions,  objective evaluation, 

Full Text: PDF(653.7KB)

Summary: 
This paper presents a novel approach of analysing colour bleeding caused by image compression. This is achieved by isolating two components of colour bleeding, and evaluating these components separately. Although these specific components of colour bleeding have not been studied with great detail in the past, with the use of a synthetic test pattern -- similar to the colour bars used to test analogue television transmissions -- we have successfully isolated, and evaluated: "colour blur" and "colour ringing," as two separate components of colour bleeding artefact. We have also developed metrics for these artefacts, and tested these derived metrics in a series of trials aimed to test the colour reproduction performance of a JPEG codec, and a JPEG2000 codec -- both implemented by the developer IrfanView. The algorithms developed to measure these artefact metrics proved to be effective tools for evaluating and benchmarking the performance of similar codecs, or different implementations of the same codecs.