The medium and the message: a revisionist view of image quality

James A. Ferwerda

doi:10.1117/12.845062

17 February 2010 The medium and the message: a revisionist view of image quality

James A. Ferwerda

Proceedings Volume 7527, Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XV; 75270J (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.845062
Event: IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging, 2010, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

In his book "Understanding Media" social theorist Marshall McLuhan declared: "The medium is the message." The thesis of this paper is that with respect to image quality, imaging system developers have taken McLuhan's dictum too much to heart. Efforts focus on improving the technical specifications of the media (e.g. dynamic range, color gamut, resolution, temporal response) with little regard for the visual messages the media will be used to communicate. We present a series of psychophysical studies that investigate the visual system's ability to "see through" the limitations of imaging media to perceive the messages (object and scene properties) the images represent. The purpose of these studies is to understand the relationships between the signal characteristics of an image and the fidelity of the visual information the image conveys. The results of these studies provide a new perspective on image quality that shows that images that may be very different in "quality", can be visually equivalent as realistic representations of objects and scenes.

Citation Download Citation

James A. Ferwerda "The medium and the message: a revisionist view of image quality", Proc. SPIE 7527, Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XV, 75270J (17 February 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.845062

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