Hyunsuk Ko successfully passed his Qualifying exam on Jan 28th. The title is “A ParaBoost Stereoscopic Image Quality Assessment (PBSIQA) System”. His Qual Exam Committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chair), Antonio Ortega, Keith Jenkins, Sandy Sawchuk and Aiichiro Nakano (Outside Member).

The design of a novel ParaBoost (parallel-boosting) stereoscopic image quality assessment (PBSIAQ) system based on machine learning is presented in his work. The PBSIQA system consists of two stages. In the first stage, they classify multiple distortions into multiple types, and develop a set of individual quality scorers targeting at specific distortion types and working in parallel in the first stage. In the second stage, to obtain the best overall performance against the whole database, they adopt the parallel boosting idea from machine learning. Extensive experimental results are provided to demonstrate that the superb performance of the proposed PBSIQA scorer, which outperforms existing stereo image quality assessment (SIQA) indices by a significant margin.