Blindly evaluating stereoscopic image quality with free-energy principle

Three-dimensional (3D) imaging technology has been growingly prevalent in today's world. But objective quality assessment of 3D images is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a blind metric to predict the perceptual quality of stereopairs within the concept of free energy. On the basis of a psychological measure, the free energy is a principle telling where supervises more and attracts human attention. We believe that the “surprise” can account for the binocular rivalry and thus be used to predict the quality of stereopairs. We first evaluate the quality of the monoscopic image, then introduce the computation process of binocular rivalry's results for deciding the relative importance of the left and right views, and finally infer the overall quality score. Our algorithm is tested on the symmetric LIVE3D-I and asymmetric LIVE3D-II databases. Experimental results confirm that the proposed blind 3D IQA technique, without distortion identification, is able to faithfully predict the visual quality of stereopairs.

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