This study examines the robustness of image quality factors in various types of environment illumination using a parameter design in the field of quality engineering. Experimental results revealed that image quality factors are influenced by environment illuminations in the following order: minimum luminance, maximum luminance and gamma.

The human visual system exhibits a characteristic known as the Helmholtz-Kohlrausch (H-K) effect: even if the hue and the lightness retain the same values, the actual lightness (perceived lightness) changes with changes in the color saturation. Quantification of this effect is expected to be useful for the future development and evaluation of high-quality displays. We have been studying the H-K effect in natural images projected by LED projectors, which play important roles in practical uses. To verify the effectiveness of the determinations of the H-K effect for natural images, we have performed a subjective-evaluation experiment by method of adjustment for natural images and compared the experimental values with values calculated from extended form of Nayatani's equation to apply to natural images. In general, we found a high correlation between the two, although there was a low correlation for some images. Therefore, we obtained a correction function derived from the subjective evaluation experiment value of 108 color (hue: 12 × saturation: 3 × lightness: 3) patterns and have applied it to estimate the equation H-K effect.

An interactive support system for image quality enhancement to adjust display equipments according to the user's own subjectivity is developed. Interactive support system for image quality enhancement enable the parameters based on user's preference to be derived by only selecting user's preference images without adjusting image quality parameters directly. In the interactive support system for image quality enhancement, the more the number of parameters is, the more effective this system is. In this paper, lightness, color and sharpness are used as the image quality parameters and the images are enhanced by increasing the number of parameters. Shape of tone curve is controlled by two image quality adjustment parameters for lightness enhancement. Images are enhanced using two image quality adjustment parameters for color enhancement. The two parameters are controlled in L* a* b* color space. Degree and coarseness of image sharpness enhancement are adjusted by controlling a radius of mask of smoothing filter and weight of adding. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, the image quality and derivation time of the proposed method are compared with a manual adjustment method.

Acquisition of accurate colors is important in the modern era of widespread exchange of electronic multimedia. The variety of device-dependent color spaces causes troubles with accurate color reproduction. In this paper we present the outlines of accomplished digital camera system with device-independent output formed from tristimulus XYZ values. The outstanding accuracy and fidelity of acquired color is achieved in our system by employing an embedded color calibration system based on emissive device generating reference calibration colors with user-defined spectral distribution and chromaticity coordinates. The system was tested by calibrating the camera using 24 reference colors spectrally reproduced from 24 color patches of the Macbeth Chart. The average color difference (CIEDE2000) has been found to be ΔE = 0.83, which is an outstanding result compared to commercially available digital cameras.

The present study proposes a method for estimation of subjective image quality, for combinations of display physical factors, based on the Mahalanobis-Taguchi system in the field of quality engineering. The proposed method estimates subjective image quality by the estimated equation based on the Mahalanobis-Taguchi System and subjective evaluation experiments using the method of successive categories for images of which parameters are combinations of gamma, maximum luminance and minimum luminance. The estimated image quality is in good agreement with the experimental subjective image quality.

The Helmholtz-Kohlrausch (H-K) effect is a phenomenon in which the perceived brightness levels induced by two stimuli are different even when two color stimuli have the same luminance and different chroma in a particular hue. This phenomenon appears on display devices, and the wider the gamut these devices have, the more the perceived brightness is affected by the H-K effect. The quantification of this effect can be expected to be useful for the development and evaluation of a wide range of display devices. However, quantification of the H-K effect would require considerable subjective evaluation experimentation, which would be a major burden. Therefore, the authors have derived perceived brightness maps for natural images using an estimation equation for the H-K effect without experimentation. The results of comparing and analyzing the calculated maps and ground truth maps obtained through subjective evaluation experiments confirm strong correlation coefficients between such maps overall. However, a tendency for the estimation of the calculation map to be poor on high chroma strongly influenced by the H-K effect was also confirmed. In this study, we propose an accuracy improvement method for the estimation of the H-K effect by correcting the calculation maps using a correction coefficient obtained by focusing on this tendency, and we confirm the effectiveness of our method.

The purpose of this study is to estimate the noise level of every pixel in a single noisy image, that is superimposed independent and non-identically distributed random variables with normal distribution. The method makes a set of similar pixels in the local region to the interest pixel using the approximate function of noise variance, and estimates with regard to the noise level. As the results show, the proposed method is effective in estimation of noise level of every pixel for any images.

Overall picture quality of a liquid crystal display (LCD) is changed by viewing conditions. An evaluation method of overall picture quality was proposed for LCDs. However, the estimation values calculated by the evaluation method differed from the subjective evaluation values, when viewing angle changed in the vertical direction. In this study, the coefficients of impairment in the evaluation equation were obtained by the multiple regression analysis using subjectively evaluated data. The evaluation method of overall picture quality was improved by weighting factors using these coefficients. As the result, the good estimation accuracy was obtained even if the viewing angle was changed both in the horizontal and vertical directions individually.

A set of three optical filters was designed and a camera system was developed using these filters in order to capture high-fidelity colors within the gamut of vision. Photographs of a number of highly saturated colors and a combination of the Macbeth chart and 18 pieces of clothing samples of various colors were taken. A 39 matrix was used to convert the camera output signals into XYZ tristimulus data. The tristimulus values of the colors were compared with those of the images captured by the camera. The average color difference, ΔE, for these samples were found to be 2.16 and 1.18, respectively.