Exploiting Change Blindness for Video Coding: Perspectives from a Less Promising User Study

What the human visual system can perceive is strongly limited by the capacity of our working memory and attention. Such limitations result in the human observer's inability to perceive large-scale changes in a stimulus, a phenomenon known as change blindness. In this paper, we started with the premise that this phenomenon can be exploited in video coding, especially HDR-video compression where the bitrate is high. We designed an HDR-video encoding approach that relies on spatially and temporally varying quantization parameters within the framework of HEVC video encoding. In the absence of a reliable change blindness prediction model, to extract compression candidate regions (CCR) we used an existing saliency prediction algorithm. We explored different configurations and carried out a subjective study to test our hypothesis. While our methodology did not lead to significantly superior performance in terms of the ratio between perceived quality and bitrate, we were able to determine potential flaws in our methodology, such as the employed saliency model for CCR prediction (chosen for computational efficiency, but eventually not sufficiently accurate), as well as a very strong subjective bias due to observers priming themselves early on in the experiment about the type of artifacts they should look for, thus creating a scenario with little ecological validity.

Energy Reduction Opportunities in HDR Video Encoding

This paper investigates the energy consumption of video encoding for high dynamic range videos. Specifically, we compare the energy consumption of the compression process using 10-bit input sequences, a tone-mapped 8-bit input sequence at 10-bit internal bit depth, and encoding an 8-bit input sequence using an encoder with an internal bit depth of 8 bit. We find that linear scaling of the luminance and chrominance values leads to degradations of the visual quality, but that significant encoding complexity and thus encoding energy can be saved. An important reason for this is the availability of vector instructions, which are not available for the 10-bit encoder. Furthermore, we find that at sufficiently low target bitrates, the compression efficiency at an internal bit depth of 8 bit exceeds the compression efficiency of regular 10-bit encoding.

A Three-Feature Model to Predict Colour Change Blindness

Change blindness is a striking shortcoming of our visual system which is exploited in the popular "Spot the difference" game. It makes us unable to notice large visual changes happening right before our eyes and illustrates the fact that we see much less than we think we do. We introduce a fully automated model to predict colour change blindness in cartoon images based on two low-level image features and observer experience. Using linear regression with only three parameters, the predictions of the proposed model correlate significantly with measured detection times. We also demonstrate the efficacy of the model to classify stimuli in terms of difficulty.