The past decades have witnessed rapid growth in imaging as a major form of communication between individuals. Due to recent advances in capture, storage, delivery and display technologies, consumers are demanding improved perceptual quality over reduced storage consumption. In this context, research and innovation in lossy image compression have been steered towards methods capable of achieving high compression ratios without compromising the perceived visual quality of images, and in some cases even enhancing the latter.
Subjective visual quality assessment of images plays a fundamental role in defining quality as perceived by human observers. Although the field of image compression is constantly evolving towards efficient solutions for higher visual qualities, standardized subjective visual quality assessment protocols are still limited to those proposed in ITU-R Recommendation BT.500 and JPEG AIC standards. The number of comprehensive and in-depth studies where different protocols are compared is still insufficient. Moreover, previous works have not investigated the effectiveness of these methods on higher quality ranges and with recent image compression methods.
This webpage collects the material described in paper [1], where the subjective visual scores collected using three subjective image quality assessment protocols, namely the Double Stimulus Continuous Quality Scale (DSCQS) and two test methods described in the JPEG AIC Part 2 standard, are compared between different laboratories under similar controlled conditions.
More detailed information on the dataset can be found in [1], or you can refer to [2] for more information on the dataset.
Contact: Michela Testolina ([email protected]).
Test material
Five images from the JPEG AIC-3 Dataset were used for the experiments [2].
Download
The dataset can be downloaded through FTP by using dedicated FTP clients, such as FileZilla or FireFTP (we recommend using FileZilla):
Protocol: FTP
FTP address: tremplin.epfl.ch
Username: [email protected]
Password: ohsh9jah4T
FTP port: 21
After you connect, choose the Nearly Visually Lossless Subjective IQA folder from the remote site, and download the relevant material.
Please read the README files for further information on the structure and the usage of the material.
Conditions of use
The data are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). You are free to share (— copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt (— remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially) the provided data.
In no event shall the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) be liable to any party for direct, indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages arising out of the use of the data and its documentation. The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) specifically disclaims any warranties. The data provided hereunder is on an “as is” basis and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has no obligation to provide maintenance, support, updates, enhancements, or modifications.
If you wish to use any of the provided material in your research, we kindly ask you to cite [1] and [2].
References
[1] Michela Testolina, Davi Lazzarotto, Rafael Rodrigues, Shima Mohammadi, João Ascenso, António Pinheiro, and Touradj Ebrahimi. “On the Performance of Subjective Visual Quality Assessment Protocols for Nearly Visually Lossless Image Compression.” Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia. 2023.
[2] Michela Testolina, Vlad Hosu, Mohsen Jenadeleh, Davi Lazzarotto, Dietmar Saupe, and Touradj Ebrahimi. “JPEG AIC-3 Dataset: Towards Defining the High Quality to Nearly Visually Lossless Quality Range.” 2023 15th International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX). IEEE, 2023.