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Sonar images are vital in ocean explorations but face transmission challenges due to limited bandwidth and unstable channels. The Just Noticeable Difference (JND) represents the minimum distortion detectable by human observers. By eliminating perceptual redundancy, JND offers a solution for efficient compression and accurate Image Quality Assessment (IQA) to enable reliable transmission. However, existing JND models prove inadequate for sonar images due to their unique redundancy distributions and the absence of pixel-level annotated data. To bridge these gaps, we propose the first sonar-specific, picture-level JND dataset and a weakly supervised JND model that infers pixel-level JND from picture-level annotations. Our approach starts with pretraining a perceptually lossy/lossless predictor, which collaborates with sonar image properties to drive an unsupervised generator producing Critically Distorted Images (CDIs). These CDIs maximize pixel differences while preserving perceptual fidelity, enabling precise JND map derivation. Furthermore, we systematically investigate JND-guided optimization for sonar image compression and IQA algorithms, demonstrating favorable performance enhancements.
Chen et al. (Tue,) studied this question.