Low Quality and Recognition of Image Content

Abstract

Assessment of visual encryption of video and image content requires a reliable estimation of content recognizability and low quality. As pointed out in the literature, current methods are insufficient and research into this topic, as well as into the relation between low quality and recognizability, is still lacking. This lack of research is primarily due to a lack of data. To improve on the status-quo we have taken a recognizability database and performed a subjective quality evaluation on a subset of the images. This gives us a new database with both subjective recognizability and quality information and allows to delve into the relation between low quality and recognizability. We analyze the relationship between quality and recognizability as well as the predictive quality of state of the art visual quality indices. We show that the visual quality indices are poor indicators for the estimation of recognizability. Furthermore, we show that they must be a poor fit because of the disparity between two distinct perceptual tasks: quality and recognizability.