EEG-Based Assessment of Perceived Quality in Complex Natural Images

• Published in: Proceedings - International Conference on Image Processing pp. 136 - 140
• Main Authors: Ajaj, Tamer, Muller, Klaus-Robert, Curio, Gabriel, Wieg, Thomas, Bosse, Sebastian
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2020
• Subjects: Distortion; EEG; Electrodes; Electroencephalography; Harmonic analysis; neural correlates; Quality assessment; Quality perception; subjective tests; Videos; Visualization
• ISSN: 2381-8549
• DOI: 10.1109/ICIP40778.2020.9191277

Psychophysiological methods gained a lot of interest in recent years as a potential remedy for the inherent flaws of overt psychophysical quality assessment methods. Among the psychophysiological monitoring methods, electroencephalography showed to be a promising choice. Specifically, the steady state visually evoked potential (SSVEP) was shown to provide a reliable neural correlate of perceived visual quality for degraded texture image patches. This paper evaluates the feasibility of the SSVEP-based quality assessment approach for more realistic and practically relevant images. To this end, we collected overt, psychophysical responses and neural, psychophysiological responses of 14 participants to 6 HD images each compressed at 4 distortion levels. The psychophysical part followed the Degradation Category Rating procedure. In the subsequent psychophysiological part, the subjects were presented with distorted and reference images alternating at a fixed rate of f_{stim}\,=5 Hz to elicit the SSVEP. We show that the amplitude of the 1 ^{st} harmonic of the SSVEP correlates significantly with the psychophysical responses (\vert \rho \vert = 0.85, p \lt 0.05) in a single channel analysis at the Oz electrode.