Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo gave a keynote speech at the 8th International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX) in Lisbon, Portugal, on June 6th. The title of his talk is “Perceptual Coding: Hype or Hope?”. The abstract of his talk is given below.
“There has been a significant progress in image/video coding in the last 50 years, and many visual coding standards have been established, including JPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H.264/AVC and H.265, in the last three decades. The visual coding research field has reached a mature stage, and the question “is there anything left for image/video coding?” arises in recent years. One emerging R&D topic is “perceptual coding”. That is, we may leverage the characteristics of the human visual system (HVS) to achieve a higher coding gain. For example, we may change the traditional quality/distortion measure (i.e., PSNR/MSE) to a new perceptual quality/distortion measure and take visual saliency and spatial-temporal masking effects into account. Recent developments in this area will be reviewed first. However, “is it sufficient to keep visual coding research vibrant and prosperous for another decade with such a modification?” The answer is probably not. In this talk, I will present a new HVS-centric coding framework that is dramatically differently from the past. This framework is centered on two key concepts – the stair quality function (SQF) and the Just-Noticeable-Differences (JND). It will lead to numerous new R&D opportunities and revolutionize coding research with modern machine learning tools.”
Perceptual coding is one of the main activities of the MCL in last 5-6 years. Several PhD students and post-doc have made contributions to this topic, including Sudeng Hu, Yu-Chieh Lin, Lina Jin and Haiqiang Wang. This project has been supported by Netflix for 3 consecutive years. Professor Kuo would like to give special thanks to Ioannis Katsavounidis, Anne Aaron and David Ronca for their support and valuable feedback and discussion.

Professor Kuo’s QoMEX presentation file can be downloaded from the following link:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39999346/2016-06-06%20QoMEX%20Keynote%20Speech.pdf