Blind quality assessment for screen content images via convolutional neural network

Abstract With the wide propagation of cloud and mobile computing, screen content images (SCIs) have become more indispensable in our daily lives. Compared to natural scene images (NSIs), SCIs possess many particular characteristics, like mixed contents, extremely sharp edges, and text graphics. Consequently, more challenges occur in the feature extraction, which is used to reflect the distortion, during the quality assessment of SCIs. Recently, some convolutional neural network (CNN) models have been designed by automatically learning feature to evaluate the quality. In this paper, we develop a novel blind quality assessment method for SCIs via the CNN. First, compared with existing CNN-based methods, the proposed method avoids the disadvantage of training with image patches, and it is the pioneering attempt that takes the entire image as inputs. Second, instead of the image gray value, the original image is decomposed into two portions, i.e., the predicted and unpredicted portions, according to the internal generative mechanism (IGM) theory as the input of CNN. Through the CNN, all features of the image are learned automatically from beginning to end, and the network finally outputs the predicted score. Since existing SCI database is too small, to fully train the network, we collected 30000 SCIs and employed a high-accuracy full-reference quality assessment metric of SCI to compute scores as the training labels. Experimental results on SIQAD database demonstrate that the proposed method is comparable to reference-based SCI quality assessment metrics and is superior to the state-of-the-art NSI quality assessment metrics.