Studying the effect of optimizing image quality in salient regions at the expense of background content

Manufacturers of commercial display devices continuously try to improve the perceived image quality of their products. By applying some post processing techniques on the incoming image signal, they aim to enhance the quality level perceived by the viewer. Applying such techniques may cause side effects on different portions of the processed image. In order to apply these techniques effectively to improve the overall quality, it is vital to understand how important quality is for different parts of the image. To study this effect, a three-phase experiment was conducted where observers were asked to score images which had different levels of quality in their saliency regions than in the background areas. The results show that the saliency area has a greater effect on the overall quality of the image than the background. This effect increases with the increasing quality difference between the two regions. It is, therefore, important to take this effect into consideration when trying to enhance the appearance of specific image regions.