Reduced-reference image quality assessment using moment method

Reduced-reference image quality assessment (RR IQA) aims to evaluate the perceptual quality of a distorted image through partial information of the corresponding reference image. In this paper, a novel RR IQA metric is proposed by using the moment method. We claim that the first and second moments of wavelet coefficients of natural images can have approximate and regular change that are disturbed by different types of distortions, and that this disturbance can be relevant to human perceptions of quality. We measure the difference of these statistical parameters between reference and distorted image to predict the visual quality degradation. The introduced IQA metric is suitable for implementation and has relatively low computational complexity. The experimental results on Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE) and Tampere Image Database (TID) image databases indicate that the proposed metric has a good predictive performance.     

一个图像质量盲评估的统计测度

本文提出了一个图像质量盲评估的统计测度.该测度首先根据自然图像的统计性质与失真图像的模型,实现对图像小波系数分布参数的盲估计;再利用估计的分布参数来计算失真图像与参考图像之间的互信息,以量化失真图像对参考图像的保真度,进而实现对图像质量的评估.本文提出的测度避免了对参考图像的依赖,且克服了现有图像质量盲评估对特征选择与提取、机器学习等过程的依赖.LIVE图像质量评估数据库的总体评估结果表明：本文提出的盲评估统计测度对图像质量评估结果与数据库的主观评估结果高度一致,且优于文献中报道的盲评估测度.     

A weighted full-reference image quality assessment based on visual saliency

In full reference image quality assessment (IQA), the images without distortion are usually employed as reference, while the structures in both reference images and distorted images are ignored and all pixels are equally treated. In addition, the role of human visual system (HVS) is not taken account into subjective IQA metric. In this paper, a weighted full-reference image quality metric is proposed, where a weight imposed on each pixel indicates its importance in IQA. Furthermore, the weights can be estimated via visual saliency computation, which can approximate the subjective IQA via exploiting the HVS. In the experiments, the proposed metric is compared with several objective IQA metrics on LIVE release 2 and TID 2008 database. The results demonstrate that SROCC and PLCC of the proposed metric are 0.9647 and 0.9721, respectively,which are higher than other methods and it only takes 427.5 s, which is lower than that of most other methods.     

Image quality assessment based on Prewitt magnitude

The goal of image quality assessment (IQA) research is to use computational models to calculate the quality of images consistently with subjective evaluations. In this paper, we propose a new image quality assessment (IQA) algorithm by combining Prewitt magnitude and regional mutual information (RMI) in HSV color space. The Prewitt operator is usually used for edge detection and can extract vertical edge more accurately than other operators. The HSV color space encapsulates information about a color in terms that are more natural and intuitive to humans. The proposed method PMRMI first transforms reference and distorted images from RGB color space into HSV color space and Prewitt magnitude is introduced to extract key edge features of each channel. Then the regional mutual information is calculated to measure the similarity of the two images. After that, a weighting method is utilized for better consistency with subjective evaluations. Therefore we get a single quality score. Experiments on various image distortion types demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve better consistency with the subjective evaluations than PSNR and SSIM.     

AdaBoost neural network and cyclopean view for no-reference stereoscopic image quality assessment

Stereoscopic imaging is widely used in many fields. In many scenarios, stereo images quality could be affected by various degradations, such as asymmetric distortion. Accordingly, to guarantee the best quality of experience, robust and accurate reference-less metrics are required for quality assessment of stereoscopic content. Most existing stereo no-reference Image Quality Assessment (IQA) models are not consistent with asymmetrical distortions. This paper presents a new no-reference stereoscopic image quality assessment metric using a human visual system (HVS) modeling and an advanced machine-learning algorithm. The proposed approach consists of two stages. In the first stage, cyclopean image is constructed considering the presence of binocular rivalry in order to cover the asymmetrically distorted part. In the second stage, gradient magnitude, relative gradient magnitude, and gradient orientation are extracted. These are used as a predictive source of information for the quality. In order to obtain the best overall performance against different databases, Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost) idea of machine learning combined with artificial neural network model has been adopted. The benchmark LIVE 3D phase-I, phase-II, and IRCCyN/IVC 3D databases have been used to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed metric performance achieves high consistency with subjective assessment and outperforms the blind stereo IQA over various types of distortion.     

Reduced reference image quality assessment based on statistics in empirical mode decomposition domain

This paper deals with the image quality assessment (IQA) task using a natural image statistics approach. A reduced reference (RRIQA) measure based on the bidimensional empirical mode decomposition is introduced. First, we decompose both, reference and distorted images, into intrinsic mode functions (IMF) and then we use the generalized Gaussian density (GGD) to model IMF coefficients of the reference image. Finally, we measure the impairment of a distorted image by fitting error between the IMF coefficients histogram of the distorted image and the estimated IMF coefficients distribution of the reference image, using the Kullback–Leibler divergence (KLD). Furthermore, to predict the quality, we propose a new support vector machine-based (SVM) classification approach as an alternative to logistic function-based regression. In order to validate the proposed measure, three benchmark datasets are involved in our experiments. Results demonstrate that the proposed metric compare favorably with alternative solutions for a wide range of degradation encountered in practical situations.     

No reference image blurriness assessment with local binary patterns

In this paper, we put forward an effective and efficient no reference image blurriness assessment metric on the basis of local binary pattern (LBP) features. In this proposal, we reveal that part of the LBP histogram bins present monotonously with the degree of blurriness. The proposed method contains the following steps. Firstly, the LBP maps of an input image are extracted with multiple radiuses. And then, the frequency of pattern histogram is analyzed before part of bins are chosen as the features. In addition, we also take the entropy of these bins as another feature. Finally, we learn the extracted features to predict the image blurriness score. Validation of the proposed method is conducted on the blurred images of LIVE-II, CSIQ, TID2008, TID2013, LIVE3D IQA Phase I and LIVE3D IQA Phase II. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art image quality assessment (IQA) methods, the proposed algorithm has notable advantage in correlation with subjective perception and computational complexity.     

Toward an unsupervised blind stereoscopic 3D image quality assessment using joint spatial and frequency representations

Existing blind stereoscopic 3D (S3D) image quality assessment (IQA) metrics usually require supervised learning methods to predict S3D image quality, which limits their applicability in practice. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised blind S3D IQA metric that utilizes the joint spatial and frequency representations of visual perception. The metric proposed in this work was inspired by the binocular visual mechanism; furthermore, it is unsupervised and does not require subject-rated samples for training. To be more specific, first, the various binocular quality-aware features in spatial and frequency domains are extracted from the monocular and cyclopean views of natural S3D image patches. Subsequently, these features are utilized to establish a pristine multivariate Gaussian (MVG) model to characterize natural S3D image regularities. Finally, with the learned MVG model, the final quality score for a distorted S3D image can be yielded using a Bhattacharyya-like distance. Our experimental results illustrate that, compared to related existing metrics, the devised metric achieves competitive prediction performance.     

No-reference image quality assessment using statistical characterization in the shearlet domain

Image and video quality measurements are crucial for many applications, such as acquisition, compression, transmission, enhancement, and reproduction. Nowadays, no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) methods have drawn extensive attention because it does not rely on any information of original images. However, most of the conventional NR-IQA methods are designed only for one or a set of predefined specific image distortion types, which are unlikely to generalize for evaluating image/video distorted with other types of distortions. In order to estimate a wide range of image distortions, in this paper, we present an efficient general-purpose NR-IQA algorithm which is based on a new multiscale directional transform (shearlet transform) with a strong ability to localize distributed discontinuities. This is mainly based on distorted natural image that leads to significant variation in the spread discontinuities in all directions. Thus, the statistical property of the distorted image is significantly different from that of natural images in fine scale shearlet coefficients, which are referred to as ‘distorted parts’. However, some ‘natural parts’ are reserved in coarse scale shearlet coefficients. The algorithm relies on utilizing the natural parts to predict the natural behavior of distorted parts. The predicted parts act as ‘reference’ and the difference between the reference and distorted parts is used as an indicator to predict the image quality. In order to achieve this goal, we modify the general sparse autoencoder to serve as a predictor to get the predicted parts from natural parts. By translating the NR-IQA problem into classification problem, the predicted parts and distorted parts are utilized to form features and the differences between them are identified by softmax classifier. The resulting algorithm, which we name SHeArlet based No-reference Image quality Assessment (SHANIA), is tested on several database (LIVE, Multiply Distorted LIVE and TID2008) and shown to be suitable for many common distortions, consistent with subjective assessment and comparable to full-reference IQA methods and state-of-the-art general purpose NR-IQA algorithms.     

基于非局部梯度的图像质量评价算法

图像质量评价研究的目标在于模拟人类视觉系统对图像质量的感知过程,构建与主观评价结果尽可能一致的客观评价算法。现有的很多算法都是基于局部结构相似设计的,但人对图像的主观感知是高级的、语义的过程,而语义信息本质上是非局部的,因此图像质量评价应该考虑图像的非局部信息。该文突破了经典的基于局部信息的算法框架,提出一种基于非局部信息的框架,并在此框架内构建了一种基于非局部梯度的图像质量评价算法,该算法通过度量参考图像与失真图像的非局部梯度之间的相似性来预测图像质量。在公开测试数据库TID2008, LIVE, CSIQ上的数值实验结果表明,该算法能获得较好的评价效果。     

Unsupervised blind image quality assessment based on joint structure and natural scene statistics features

Compared with the widely used supervised blind image quality assessment (BIQA) models, unsupervised BIQA models require little prior knowledge for calculating the objective quality scores of distorted images. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised BIQA method that aims to achieve both good performance and generalization capability with low computational complexity. Carefully selected and extensive structure and natural scene statistics (NSS) features can better represent image quality. First, we employ phase congruency (PC) and finely selected gradient magnitude map and Laplacian of Gaussian response (GM-LOG) features to represent image structure information. Second, we calculate the local mean-subtracted and contrast-normalized (MSCN) coefficients and the Karhunen–Loéve transform (KLT) coefficients to represent the naturalness of the distorted images. Last, multivariate Gaussian (MVG) model with joint features extracted from both the pristine images and the distorted images is adopted to calculate the objective image quality. Extensive experiments conducted on nine IQA databases demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art BIQA methods.     

利用人眼视觉特性的图像结构差异性杂波度量

针对光电图像杂波效应对目标获取性能的影响,提出一种基于人眼视觉特性的图像结构差异性杂波度量。依据人眼对图像结构的高度自适应性以及图像质量评估领域广泛认可的图像结构的定义方法,计算目标和杂波的结构相似性;并根据人眼的视觉显著性原理,给出两种适用于结构相似性的显著性加权信息度量。采用外场实验对该杂波度量的合理性进行验证,得出基于该杂波度量的目标预测性能与外场目标获取性能,在均方根误差、相关性方面都优于现有的杂波度量的预测性能。     

No-reference image quality assessment based on non-subsample shearlet transform and natural scene statistics

A novel no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) method is proposed for assessing image quality across multifarious distortion categories. The new method transforms distorted images into the shearlet domain using a non-subsample shearlet transform (NSST), and designs the image quality feature vector to describe images utilizing natural scenes statistical features:coefficient distribution, energy distribution and structural correlation (SC) across orientations and scales. The final image quality is achieved from distortion classification and regression models trained by a support vector machine (SVM). The experimental results on the LIVE2 IQA database indicate that the method can assess image quality effectively, and the extracted features are susceptive to the category and severity of distortion. Furthermore, our proposed method is database independent and has a higher correlation rate and lower root mean squared error (RMSE) with human perception than other high performance NR IQA methods.     

Full-reference IPTV image quality assessment by deeply learning structural cues

Image quality assessment (IQA) attempts to quantify the quality-aware visual attributes perceived by humans. They can be divided into subjective and objective image quality assessment. Subjective IQA algorithms rely on human judgment of image quality, where the human visual perception functions as the dominant factor However, they cannot be widely applied in practice due to the heavy reliance on different individuals. Motivated by the fact that objective IQA largely depends on image structural information, we propose a structural cues-based full-reference IPTV IQA algorithm. More specifically, we first design a grid-based object detection module to extract multiple structural information from both the reference IPTV image (i.e., video frame) and the test one. Afterwards, we propose a structure-preserved deep neural networks to generate the deep representation for each IPTV image. Subsequently, a new distance metric is proposed to measure the similarity between the reference image and the evaluated image. A test IPV image with a small calculated distance is considered as a high quality one. Comprehensive comparative study with the state-of-the-art IQA algorithms have shown that our method is accurate and robust.     

适应于图像复原的无参考图像质量评价方法

由于图像降质过程的复杂性、成像获取条件限制,以及图像本身的复杂性和图像复原过程的病态性,图像复原解大多都是近似的或畸变的,一种适应于图像复原质量评价的计算方法将大大提升图像复原的应用范围。针对图像复原过程的病态性,提出了一种针对图像复原图像质量评价的计算方法,该算法通过在图像质量算子中引入图像相似矩阵和图像复原趋势矩阵,使其能适应复原对于图像结构或噪声结构的变化。该图像质量评价算子计算无需参考图像,可以很好地反映图像的模糊程度和噪声程度,并且计算简单。实验证明了该图像质量评价算子的有效性。     

Color image quality assessment based on sparse representation and reconstruction residual

Image quality assessment (IQA) is a fundamental problem in image processing. While in practice almost all images are represented in the color format, most of the current IQA metrics are designed in gray-scale domain. Color influences the perception of image quality, especially in the case where images are subject to color distortions. With this consideration, this paper presents a novel color image quality index based on Sparse Representation and Reconstruction Residual (SRRR). An overcomplete color dictionary is first trained using natural color images. Then both reference and distorted images are represented using the color dictionary, based on which two feature maps are constructed to measure structure and color distortions in a holistic manner. With the consideration that the feature maps are insensitive to image contrast change, the reconstruction residuals are computed and used as a complementary feature. Additionally, luminance similarity is also incorporated to produce the overall quality score for color images. Experiments on public databases demonstrate that the proposed method achieves promising performance in evaluating traditional distortions, and it outperforms the existing metrics when used for quality evaluation of color-distorted images.