Atheism and materialism in the age of the the Enlightenment
The 18th century is commonly called as the age of the Enlightenment. Atheism and hence materialism were in fashion among intellectuals. Materialists claim that matter in motion or in flux is sufficient to account for all phenomena. Theological notion as the “soul” seemed to be an unnecessary hypothesis. Most radical materialists of the Enlightenment were […]
Non Reference Video Quality Assessment
Appendix: blurriness as non-reference Video Quality Metric Three necessary conditions for each Video Quality Metric (VQM) to meet: 1) symmetry: VQM(x, y) = VQM(y, x); 2) boundedness: 0 ≤ VQM(x, y) ≤ 1 (or 100) 3) unique maximum: VQM(x, y) = 1 if and only if x = y. Non-Reference Image Quality Assessment […]
Anthropic Principle in Cosmology
The essence of Anthropic principle in single sentence: “The Universe is planned in such a way to admit the existence of a conscious observer who would understand it”. In detail, our universe was “fine-tuned” in ways to make it especially suited to living beings (with or without consciousness). What’s “fine-tuning” – tiny change in any […]
The problem of Free Will
The problem of Free Will is thorny, but it can’t left non-debated. In Newtonian Physics worldview there is no room for Free Will, everything is predetermined. I read a paper of Erwin Schrodinger (one of the greatest physicists of XX century) “Indeterminism and free will” (published in 1936). Quantum Mechanics does not resolve the problem […]
HEVC Balanced Tiling
HEVC supports non-uniform (or arbitrary) tiling. Therefore encoder should adapt tiling grid in order to minimize the decoding time. Bitsizes of all tiles are expected to be nearly equal each to other. Otherwise, the decoding process can be imbalanced ( if multiple threads are applied to decode tiles simultaneously then small sized tiles are finished […]
Why is there no evidence of civilizations prior to about 12,000 years ago?
Why is there no evidence of civilizations prior to about 12,000 years ago, despite Homo Sapiens having been around since 200,000 to 300,000 years ago? Most archeologists suppose that the reason for lack of civilizations before 12,000 years ago is that unfavorable climate which prevented people from forming civilizations. Homo Sapiens have been around since […]
SSIM and MS-SSIM Codes
C++ version of SSIM is available at https://github.com/utlive/ConsoleSSIM.git . Notice that to build this code by Visual Studio you need to install MFC. The code was developed by Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin (a trustful source) The exe-file (conSSIM.exe) accepts only jpg-files are input (an annoying restriction). […]
Correlation of different metrics (video quality models) with subjective quality assessment (DMOS)
Taken from the paper “Study of Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of Video”, Kalpana Seshadrinathan et al. Notes: The paper was published at 2009, prior to VMAF developed Good HVS-correlated metrics (like MOVIE) are unable to provide real-time measurement of video quality, since they are too complex. DMOS = MOS_pristine – MOS_compressed […]
Leading Pictures in VVC and HEVC
Both HEVC and VVC can contain so-called leading pictures “around” a key frame. The leading pictures definition: to follow the key frame in decoding order but to precede it in output order. Definition: Random access means the ability to start consuming or playing video content from positions other than the very beginning of the bitstream. […]
AVIF Image Format
AVIF image format is a new emerging format to contain AV1 images (like HEIF for HEVC/H.265). The spec. of AVIF format . Notice that AVIF format is based on AV1 intra encoded images. Recently it was declared that Safari 16.0 for iOS 16 supported AVIF image format. In the recent version of ffmpeg (ffmpeg version […]