CYCLOP: A stereo color image quality assessment metric

In this work, a reduced reference (RR) perceptual quality metric for color stereoscopic images is presented. Given a reference stereo pair of images and their “distorted” version, we first compute the disparity map of both the reference and the distorted stereoscopic images. To this end, we define a method for color image disparity estimation based on the structure tensors properties and eigenvalues/eigenvectors analysis. Then, we compute the cyclopean images of both the reference and the distorted pairs. Thereafter, we apply a multispectral wavelet decomposition to the two cyclopean color images in order to describe the different channels in the human visual system (HVS). Then, contrast sensitivity function (CSF) filtering is performed to obtain the same visual sensitivity information within the original and the distorted cyclopean images. Thereafter, based on the properties of the human visual system (HVS), rational sensitivity thresholding is performed to obtain the sensitivity coefficients of the cyclopean images. Finally, RR stereo color image quality assessment (SCIQA) is performed by comparing the sensitivity coefficients of the cyclopean images and studying the coherence between the disparity maps of the reference and the distorted pairs. Experiments performed on color stereoscopic images indicate that the objective scores obtained by the proposed metric agree well with the subjective assessment scores.