ABSTRACT
In most image processing systems, a human observer is the final destination to view the processed images. As shown in this chapter, the human visual system (HVS) is more receptive to a certain frequency band than others. Moreover, the human vision is sensitive to objects against certain backgrounds. In a like fashion, the HVS favors certain colors over others. It is, therefore, imperative that an image processing system exploits the characteristics of the HVS so as to deliver images of the best quality in color and detail. Another objective in mimicking the HVS is to be able to reduce or compress the amount of data in the original image to a maximum without being able to notice any degradation in the image quality. As shown later in this book, efficient compression algorithms exploit not only the spatial but also the temporal aspect of the HVS in achieving a large amount of data compression at visually lossless quality. This chapter describes the human visual perception from a system standpoint to explain such phenomenon as spatial masking, etc.
