In general, owing to the benefits obtained from original information, full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) achieves relatively higher prediction accuracy than no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA). By fully utilizing reference images, conventional FR-IQA methods have been investigated to produce objective scores that are close to subjective scores. In contrast, NR-IQA does not consider reference images; thus, its performance is inferior to that of FR-IQA. To alleviate this accuracy discrepancy between FR-IQA and NR-IQA methods, we propose a blind image evaluator based on a convolutional neural network (BIECON). To imitate FR-IQA behavior, we adopt the strong representation power of a deep convolutional neural network to generate a local quality map, similar to FR-IQA. To obtain the best results from the deep neural network, replacing hand-crafted features with automatically learned features is necessary. To apply the deep model to the NR-IQA framework, three critical problems must be resolved: 1) lack of training data; 2) absence of local ground truth targets; and 3) different purposes of feature learning. BIECON follows the FR-IQA behavior using the local quality maps as intermediate targets for conventional neural networks, which leads to NR-IQA prediction accuracy that is comparable with that of state-of-the-art FR-IQA methods.

This paper addresses the problems of feature representation of skeleton joints and the modeling of temporal dynamics to recognize human actions. Traditional methods generally use relative coordinate systems dependent on some joints, and model only the long-term dependency, while excluding short-term and medium term dependencies. Instead of taking raw skeletons as the input, we transform the skeletons into another coordinate system to obtain the robustness to scale, rotation and translation, and then extract salient motion features from them. Considering that Long Shortterm Memory (LSTM) networks with various time-step sizes can model various attributes well, we propose novel ensemble Temporal Sliding LSTM (TS-LSTM) networks for skeleton-based action recognition. The proposed network is composed of multiple parts containing short-term, mediumterm and long-term TS-LSTM networks, respectively. In our network, we utilize an average ensemble among multiple parts as a final feature to capture various temporal dependencies. We evaluate the proposed networks and the additional other architectures to verify the effectiveness of the proposed networks, and also compare them with several other methods on five challenging datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our network models achieve the state-of-the-art performance through various temporal features. Additionally, we analyze a relation between the recognized actions and the multi-term TS-LSTM features by visualizing the softmax features of multiple parts.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been shown to deliver standout performance on a wide variety of visual information processing applications. However, this rapidly developing technology has only recently been applied with systematic energy to the problem of picture-quality prediction, primarily because of limitations imposed by a lack of adequate ground-truth human subjective data. This situation has begun to change with the development of promising data-gathering methods that are driving new approaches to deep-learning-based perceptual picture-quality prediction. Here, we assay progress in this rapidly evolving field, focusing, in particular, on new ways to collect large quantities of ground-truth data and on recent CNN-based picture-quality prediction models that deliver excellent results in a large, real-world, picture-quality database.

Image recognition based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has recently been shown to deliver the state-of-the-art performance in various areas of computer vision and image processing. Nevertheless, applying a deep CNN to no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) remains a challenging task due to critical obstacles, i.e., the lack of a training database. In this paper, we propose a CNN-based NR-IQA framework that can effectively solve this problem. The proposed method-deep image quality assessor (DIQA)-separates the training of NR-IQA into two stages: (1) an objective distortion part and (2) a human visual system-related part. In the first stage, the CNN learns to predict the objective error map, and then the model learns to predict subjective score in the second stage. To complement the inaccuracy of the objective error map prediction on the homogeneous region, we also propose a reliability map. Two simple handcrafted features were additionally employed to further enhance the accuracy. In addition, we propose a way to visualize perceptual error maps to analyze what was learned by the deep CNN model. In the experiments, the DIQA yielded the state-of-the-art accuracy on the various databases.

In this paper, we propose a non-orthogonal multiple access-based multiuser beamforming (NOMA-BF) system designed to enhance the sum capacity. In the proposed NOMA-BF system, a single BF vector is shared by two users, so that the number of supportable users can be increased. However, sharing a BF vector leads to interference from other beams as well as from the other user sharing the BF vector. Therefore, to reduce interference and improve the sum capacity, we additionally propose a clustering and power allocation algorithm. This clustering algorithm, which selects two users with high correlation and a large gain-difference between their channels, can reduce the interference from other beams and from the other user as well. Furthermore, power allocation ensures that each user's transmit power is allocated so as to maximize the sum capacity. Numerical results verify that the proposed NOMA-BF system improves the sum capacity, compared to the conventional multiuser BF system.

Since human observers are the ultimate receivers of digital images, image quality metrics should be designed from a human-oriented perspective. Conventionally, a number of full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) methods adopted various computational models of the human visual system (HVS) from psychological vision science research. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural networks (CNN) based FR-IQA model, named Deep Image Quality Assessment (DeepQA), where the behavior of the HVS is learned from the underlying data distribution of IQA databases. Different from previous studies, our model seeks the optimal visual weight based on understanding of database information itself without any prior knowledge of the HVS. Through the experiments, we show that the predicted visual sensitivity maps agree with the human subjective opinions. In addition, DeepQA achieves the state-of-the-art prediction accuracy among FR-IQA models.