Subjective quality rating does not reflect the properties of the image directly, but it is the outcome of a quality decision making process, which includes quantification of subjective quality experience. Such a rich subjective content is often ignored. We conducted two experiments (with 28 and 20 observers), in order to study the effect of paper grade on image quality experience of the ink-jet prints. Image quality experience was studied using a grouping task and a quality rating task. Both tasks included an interview, but in the latter task we examined the relations of different subjective attributes in this experience. We found out that the observers use an attribute hierarchy, where the high-level attributes are more experiential, general and abstract, while low-level attributes are more detailed and concrete. This may reflect the hierarchy of the human visual system. We also noticed that while the observers show variable subjective criteria for IQ, the reliability of average subjective estimates is high: when two different observer groups estimated the same images in the two experiments, correlations between the mean ratings were between .986 and .994, depending on the image content.

Date Published: 19 January 2009
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 7242, Image Quality and System Performance VI, 72420D (19 January 2009); doi: 10.1117/12.807142

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7242:
Image Quality and System Performance VI
Susan P. Farnand; Frans Gaykema, Editor(s)