Critical Issues and Challenges

Looking to the future research in the field of digital picture processing, coding and communications, this book addresses issues in three areas, including the VHS based picture quality assessment and metrics, perceptual picture coding and compression, and post processing (restoration and concealment) algorithms and techniques for picture reconstruction with improved visual quality. This concluding chapter attempts to highlight a number of issues and challenges which have been raised by contributors of this handbook in previous chapters, as well as by others [Wat93b, vdBL98, FvdBL02, Wuv00, Cav02]. Since these issues are all related to human visual perception, inevitably they are leading back to fundamental questions and, maybe, new challenges to vision research and/or how to transfer vision science, in the context of this handbook, to imaging and visual communication systems engineering.