The past decades have witnessed rapid growth in imaging as a major form of communication between individuals. Due to recent advances in capture, storage, delivery, and display technologies, consumers demand improved perceptual quality while requiring reduced storage. In this context, research and innovation in lossy image compression have steered towards methods capable of achieving high compression ratios without compromising the perceived visual quality of images. Subjective and objective visual quality assessment of images play a fundamental role in defining quality as perceived by human observers. Although the field of image compression is constantly evolving towards efficient solutions for higher visual qualities, standardized subjective visual quality assessment protocols are still limited to those proposed in ITU-R Recommendation BT.500 and JPEG AIC standards. Similarly, objective image quality metrics often exhibit limited correlation with subjective quality scores across various distortion types and intensities, and little to no work has been devoted to assessing the performance of these metrics on images with compression artifacts in the high to nearly visually lossless quality range. This talk discusses the effectiveness of both subjective and objective image quality assessment methods on coding artifacts with higher visual quality. Moreover, ongoing solutions investigated in the context of the JPEG AIC activity are presented. Speaker(s): Michela Testolina, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/411480

Abstract Over the last few decades, we have witnessed various microsystems revolutionized fundamental and applied science. Due to their small size and low damping, these devices often exhibit significant nonlinearity, which narrows the operational range of these impressive applications. Therefore, understanding the mechanisms leading to nonlinearity in such systems is crucial for eliminating obstacles to their further development. Motivated by the need to advance current capabilities of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), our research has been focused on the implementation of intentional intrinsic nonlinearity in the design of micro resonators. We have demonstrated that harnessing nonlinearity enables the exploitation of various nonlinear phenomena, not attainable in linear settings, such as broadband resonances, dynamic instabilities, nonlinear hysteresis, and passive targeted energy transfers. We have developed a comprehensive analytical, numerical, and experimental methodology to consider structural nonlinearity as a main design factor, enabling to tailor mechanical resonances and achieve targeted performance. We investigated the mechanism of geometric nonlinearity in a non-prismatic microresonator and suggested strategies to tailor the various types of nonlinear resonance. Our more recent works focus on exploiting nonlinearity and multimodality simultaneously by internally coupling two or more modes through the mechanism of internal resonance. This talk will introduce various types of nonlinear phenomena realized in micro systems and discuss their unique behavioral features that can be exploited in the field of MEMS. Speaker(s): Dr. Hanna Cho, Agenda: 6:30 – 7:00 PM Registration & Networking 7:00 – 7:45 PM Invited Talk 7:45 – 8:00 PM Questions & Answers Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/410528