To look superior and acceptable in society, people from all over the world use various types of cosmetic products to enhance or alter their facial appearance and body texture. In recent times, an exponential surge in cosmetic use has been observed in Pakistan, and hence spending money on personal-care products is high. However, there are many reported facts about high loads of lead, mercury, copper, and others hazardous and cancerous elements in local Pakistani cosmetic brands. Consumers of these brands are at high risk of many clinical issues, including cancer. As such, it is a necessity to make people aware of the devastating harmful effects related to cosmetic use. The aim of this study was to provide information for stakeholders and raise awareness in the general public about the use of these local unauthorized personal-care cosmetic products, along with government strategies to stop this cosmetic blight on human health.
The usage of media such as images and videos has been extensively increased in recent years. It has become impractical to store images and videos acquired by camera sensors in their raw form due to their huge storage size. Generally, image data is compressed with a compression algorithm and then stored or transmitted to another platform. Thus, image compression helps to reduce the storage size and transmission cost of the images and videos. However, image compression might cause visual artifacts, depending on the compression level. In this regard, performance evaluation of the compression algorithms is an essential task needed to reconstruct images with visually or near-visually lossless quality in case of lossy compression. The performance of the compression algorithms is assessed by both subjective and objective image quality assessment (IQA) methodologies. In this paper, subjective and objective IQA methods are integrated to evaluate the range of the image quality metrics (IQMs) values that guarantee the visually or near-visually lossless compression performed by the JPEG 1 standard (ISO/IEC 10918). A novel “Flicker Test Software” is developed for conducting the proposed subjective and objective evaluation study. In the flicker test, the selected test images are subjectively analyzed by subjects at different compression levels. The IQMs are calculated at the previous compression level, when the images were visually lossless for each subject. The results analysis shows that the objective IQMs with more closely packed values having the least standard deviation that guaranteed the visually lossless compression of the images with JPEG 1 are the feature similarity index measure (FSIM), the multiscale structural similarity index measure (MS-SSIM), and the information content weighted SSIM (IW-SSIM), with average values of 0.9997, 0.9970, and 0.9970 respectively.
Recently, the JPEG working group (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG1) developed an international standard, JPEG 360, that specifies the metadata and functionalities for saving and sharing 360-degree images efficiently to create a more realistic environment in various virtual reality services. We surveyed the metadata formats of existing 360-degree images and compared them to the JPEG 360 metadata format. We found that existing omnidirectional cameras and stitching software packages use formats that are incompatible with the JPEG 360 standard to embed metadata in JPEG image files. This paper proposes an easy-to-use tool for embedding JPEG 360 standard metadata for 360-degree images in JPEG image files using a JPEG-defined box format: the JPEG universal metadata box format. The proposed implementation will help 360-degree cameras and software vendors provide immersive services to users in a standardized manner for various markets, such as entertainment, education, professional training, navigation, and virtual and augmented reality applications. We also propose and develop an economical JPEG 360 standard compatible panoramic image acquisition system from a single PTZ camera with a special-use case of a wide field of view image of a conference or meeting. A remote attendee of the conference/meeting can see the realistic and immersive environment through our PTZ panorama in virtual reality.
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