A color-based technique for measuring visible loss for use in image data communication

Abstract

The concept of the global information infrastructure and specifically that of the World Wide Web (WWW) has led to users accessing data of different media including images and video data over a wide area network. These data objects have sizes the order of megabytes and communication time is very large. The data size can be reduced by applying loss-inducing techniques and this will lead to reduction in communication time. Several loss-inducing techniques have been developed and each image is treated differently by each technique. In some cases an acceptable quality of the image is obtained and in some cases it is not. In this paper we develop a color-based technique to quantify the data loss when a loss-inducing technique is applied to an image. This will result in estimating whether the resulting image is indistinguishable from the original with respect to the human eye. We illustrate its use to classify images according to the loss they can tolerate. This avoids redundant communication of a high quality image when a lower quality image can satisfy the application resulting in the conservation and better usage of network resources. We present the technique and experimental evaluation to prove its validity.

This research is supported in part by a grant from NSF (NCR-9405931) and a NASA fellowship