Enhancing video quality based on psychophysical studies of smooth pursuit eye movements

When motion occurs in a scene, the quality of video degrades due to motion smear, which results in a loss of contrast in the image. The characteristics of the human vision system when smooth pursuit eye movements occur are different from those when the eye fixates on an object such as a video screen during motion. Smooth pursuit eye movements dominate in the presence of dynamic stimuli. In the presence of smooth pursuit eye movements, the contrast sensitivity for increasing target velocities shifts toward lower spatial frequencies. The sensitivity for low spatial frequencies during motion is higher than for a stationary case. This dissertation will propose a method to improve the perceptual quality of video using temporal enhancement prefiltering technique based on the characteristics of Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements (SPEM). The resulting technique closely matches the characteristics of the human visual system (HVS). When motion occurs, the eye tracks the moving targets in a scene as opposed to fixating on any portion of the scene. Hence, psychophysical studies of smooth pursuit eye movements were used as a basis to design the temporal filters. Results of experiments show that temporal enhancement results in improved quality by increasing the apparent sharpness of the image sequence. In this dissertation, a study of research describing how motion affects the image quality at the camera lens and the human eye is presented. This dissertation uses that research to develop a temporal enhancement technique to improve the quality of video degraded by motion.