A Study on the Relationship Between Event-Related Potentials and Image Quality Variation

The relationship between event-related potentials (ERPs) and image quality variation was studied in this paper. Two independent image attributes, white level (WL) and color saturation (CS), were used as two alterable parameters for changing image quality. The corresponding images were presented to subjects, and subjects were asked to indicate whether they had perceived a quality change. The results showed that the perceivable impairment of image quality elicited measurable ERPs (the so-called P300 component) at latency of about 300-550 ms for all subjects. The more degraded the image quality, the earlier and higher the P300 is rising. The latency and amplitude of ERPs changed with the image quality caused by different WL and CS logarithmically. In addition, the peak amplitudes and latency are highly correlated with the rating results obtained in rating experiment. The corresponding regression functions matched well, which proved the reasonability of utilizing ERPs in assessing image quality.