No-Reference Learning-Based and Human Visual-Based Image Quality Assessment Metric

With the rapid growth of multimedia applications and technologies, objective image quality assessment (IQA) became a topic of fundamental interest. No-Reference (NR) IQA algorithms are more suitable to real-world applications where the original image is not available. In order to be more consistent with human perception, this paper proposes a new NR-IQA metric where the input image is firstly decomposed to several frequency sub-bands which mimic the human visual system (HVS). Then, the statistical features are extracted from these frequency bands and used to fit a multivariate Gaussian distribution (MVGD). Finally, the model obtained by training predicts the quality of the input image. Experimental results demonstrate the method effectiveness and show its robustness when tested by different databases. Moreover, the predicted quality is more consistent with human perception.

[1]  Alan C. Bovik,et al.  Image information and visual quality , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[2]  Yongmin Kim,et al.  A de-blocking algorithm and a blockiness metric for highly compressed images , 2002, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol..

[3]  Andrew Perkis,et al.  No-reference JPEG-image quality assessment using GAP-RBF , 2007, Signal Process..

[4]  Soo-Chang Pei,et al.  Image Quality Assessment Using Human Visual DOG Model Fused With Random Forest , 2015, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[5]  Lina J. Karam,et al.  A No-Reference Objective Image Sharpness Metric Based on the Notion of Just Noticeable Blur (JNB) , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[6]  Yuukou Horita,et al.  No reference image quality assessment for JPEG2000 based on spatial features , 2008, Signal Process. Image Commun..

[7]  Patrick Le Callet,et al.  Frequency and spatial pooling of visual differences for still image quality assessment , 2000, Electronic Imaging.

[8]  Zhou Wang,et al.  Image Quality Assessment: From Error Measurement to Structural Similarity , 2004 .

[9]  Hua Huang,et al.  No-reference image quality assessment based on spatial and spectral entropies , 2014, Signal Process. Image Commun..

[10]  Eric C. Larson,et al.  Most apparent distortion: full-reference image quality assessment and the role of strategy , 2010, J. Electronic Imaging.

[11]  Weisi Lin,et al.  A locally-adaptive algorithm for measuring blocking artifacts in images and videos , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37512).

[12]  Alan C. Bovik,et al.  . Efficient DCT-domain blind measurement and reduction of blocking artifacts , 2002, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol..

[13]  Alan C. Bovik,et al.  Blind Image Quality Assessment: From Natural Scene Statistics to Perceptual Quality , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[14]  Alan C. Bovik,et al.  Making a “Completely Blind” Image Quality Analyzer , 2013, IEEE Signal Processing Letters.

[15]  Lei Zhang,et al.  Learning without Human Scores for Blind Image Quality Assessment , 2013, 2013 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[16]  Zheng Liu,et al.  Image fusion by using steerable pyramid , 2001, Pattern Recognit. Lett..

[17]  Zhou Wang,et al.  Blind measurement of blocking artifacts in images , 2000, Proceedings 2000 International Conference on Image Processing (Cat. No.00CH37101).

[18]  Alan C. Bovik,et al.  A Two-Step Framework for Constructing Blind Image Quality Indices , 2010, IEEE Signal Processing Letters.

[19]  Christophe Charrier,et al.  Blind Image Quality Assessment: A Natural Scene Statistics Approach in the DCT Domain , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[20]  Ramakrishnan Mukundan,et al.  Image quality assessment by discrete orthogonal moments , 2010, Pattern Recognit..

[21]  Qingjie Zhao,et al.  Blind image quality assessment by relative gradient statistics and adaboosting neural network , 2016, Signal Process. Image Commun..

[22]  Lei Zhang,et al.  A Feature-Enriched Completely Blind Image Quality Evaluator , 2015, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[23]  Abdelhakim Saadane,et al.  Reference free quality metric for JPEG-2000 compressed images , 2005, Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Signal Processing and Its Applications, 2005..

[24]  Alan C. Bovik,et al.  No-Reference Image Quality Assessment in the Spatial Domain , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[25]  Ahmet M. Eskicioglu,et al.  An SVD-based grayscale image quality measure for local and global assessment , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[26]  S. Gabarda,et al.  Blind image quality assessment through anisotropy. , 2007, Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision.

[27]  Scott J. Daly A visual model for optimizing the design of image processing algorithms , 1994, Proceedings of 1st International Conference on Image Processing.

[28]  Sheila S. Hemami,et al.  VSNR: A Wavelet-Based Visual Signal-to-Noise Ratio for Natural Images , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[29]  Nikolay N. Ponomarenko,et al.  Image database TID2013: Peculiarities, results and perspectives , 2015, Signal Process. Image Commun..

[30]  Judith Redi,et al.  Supporting visual quality assessment with machine learning , 2013, EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing.

[31]  Wu Xiao-jun,et al.  No-reference blur image quality assemssment based on gradient similarity , 2013 .