基于人眼失真敏感度的图像质量评价算法研究

人眼作为图像的最终观测者,对图像失真的敏感度会随着图像纹理的变化而变化。根据人眼视觉系统的这一特性,将图像的纹理信息引入到图像质量计算中,提出了一种基于人眼失真敏感度的结构相似度算法(DS-SSIM)。通过对LIVE DATABASE中5种失真类型共779张失真图像的仿真实验得出,相比PSNR,SSIM,ESSIM等算法,DS-SSIM算法的评价结果与人为主观评分具有更高的一致性,更加符合人眼视觉特性。     

Multi-layer and Multi-scale feature aggregation for DIBR-Synthesized image quality assessment

Depth-Image-Based Rendering (DIBR) is one of the main fundamental techniques for generating new viewpoints in 3D video applications such as multi-viewpoint video (MVV), free viewpoint video (FVV) and virtual reality (VR). Due to the imperfections of color images, depth maps or texture restoration techniques, several types of distortions occur in synthesized views. However, most of related works evaluated the quality of DIBR-synthesized views by only detecting a specific type of distortion, such as stretching, black holes, blurring, etc., which were unable to accurately evaluate the quality of DIBR-synthesized views. In this paper, a new no-reference image quality assessment method is proposed to evaluate the quality of DIBR-synthesized images by combining multi-layer and multi-scale features of images. To be specific, the distortions introduced by different stages of virtual viewpoint synthesis are first analyzed, and then multi-layer and multi-scale features are extracted to estimate the degree of texture and structure distortions. As a result, individual quality scores associated with two types of distortions (e.g., structural distortion and texture distortion) are aggregated to an overall image quality. Experimental results on two publicly available DIBR datasets show that the method has better performance than the state-of-the-art models.Index Terms: image quality assessment, DIBR-synthesized image, distortion correction, BIQA.     

No-reference image quality assessment based on spatial and spectral entropies

We develop an efficient general-purpose no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) model that utilizes local spatial and spectral entropy features on distorted images. Using a 2-stage framework of distortion classification followed by quality assessment, we utilize a support vector machine (SVM) to train an image distortion and quality prediction engine. The resulting algorithm, dubbed Spatial–Spectral Entropy-based Quality (SSEQ) index, is capable of assessing the quality of a distorted image across multiple distortion categories. We explain the entropy features used and their relevance to perception and thoroughly evaluate the algorithm on the LIVE IQA database. We find that SSEQ matches well with human subjective opinions of image quality, and is statistically superior to the full-reference (FR) IQA algorithm SSIM and several top-performing NR IQA methods: BIQI, DIIVINE, and BLIINDS-II. SSEQ has a considerably low complexity. We also tested SSEQ on the TID2008 database to ascertain whether it has performance that is database independent.     

基于特征融合的无参考屏幕图像质量评价

考虑到人类视觉系统对图像边缘和局部纹理信息较为敏感,本文提出一种基于特征融合的无参考屏幕图像质量评价方法。所提方法通过梯度方向直方图和局部二值模式分别提取屏幕图像的边缘和局部纹理信息,接着通过特征融合过程得到一个更加能够描述屏幕失真的融合特征,最后采用支持向量回归训练得到屏幕图像融合特征向量与主观质量分数的质量评价映射模型。实验结果显示,与现有的图像质量评价方法相比,本文所提算法能够更好地反映出人类视觉系统对屏幕图像的主观感知度。      

Color local texture features for color face recognition

This paper proposes new color local texture features, i.e., color local Gabor wavelets (CLGWs) and color local binary pattern (CLBP), for the purpose of face recognition (FR). The proposed color local texture features are able to exploit the discriminative information derived from spatiochromatic texture patterns of different spectral channels within a certain local face region. Furthermore, in order to maximize a complementary effect taken by using both color and texture information, the opponent color texture features that capture the texture patterns of spatial interactions between spectral channels are also incorporated into the generation of CLGW and CLBP. In addition, to perform the final classification, multiple color local texture features (each corresponding to the associated color band) are combined within a feature-level fusion framework. Extensive and comparative experiments have been conducted to evaluate our color local texture features for FR on five public face databases, i.e., CMU-PIE, Color FERET, XM2VTSDB, SCface, and FRGC 2.0. Experimental results show that FR approaches using color local texture features impressively yield better recognition rates than FR approaches using only color or texture information. Particularly, compared with grayscale texture features, the proposed color local texture features are able to provide excellent recognition rates for face images taken under severe variation in illumination, as well as for small- (low-) resolution face images. In addition, the feasibility of our color local texture features has been successfully demonstrated by making comparisons with other state-of-the-art color FR methods.     

No-reference image quality assessment using visual codebooks

The goal of no-reference objective image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is to develop a computational model that can predict the human-perceived quality of distorted images accurately and automatically without any prior knowledge of reference images. Most existing NR-IQA approaches are distortion specific and are typically limited to one or two specific types of distortions. In most practical applications, however, information about the distortion type is not really available. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose NR-IQA approach based on visual codebooks. A visual codebook consisting of Gabor-filter-based local features extracted from local image patches is used to capture complex statistics of a natural image. The codebook encodes statistics by quantizing the feature space and accumulating histograms of patch appearances. This method does not assume any specific types of distortions; however, when evaluating images with a particular type of distortion, it does require examples with the same or similar distortion for training. Experimental results demonstrate that the predicted quality score using our method is consistent with human-perceived image quality. The proposed method is comparable to state-of-the-art general-purpose NR-IQA methods and outperforms the full-reference image quality metrics, peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index on the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering IQA database.     

An optimized CNN-based quality assessment model for screen content image

Most existing convolutional neural network (CNN) based models designed for natural image quality assessment (IQA) employ image patches as training samples for data augmentation, and obtain final quality score by averaging all predicted scores of image patches. This brings two problems when applying these methods for screen content image (SCI) quality assessment. Firstly, SCI contains more complex content compared to natural image. As a result, qualities of SCI patches are different, and the subjective differential mean opinion score (DMOS) is not appropriate as qualities of all image patches. Secondly, the average score of image patches does not represent the quality of entire SCI since the human visual system (HVS) is sensitive to image patches containing texture and edge information. In this paper, we propose a novel quadratic optimized model based on the deep convolutional neural network (QODCNN) for full-reference (FR) and no-reference (NR) SCI quality assessment to overcome these two problems. The contribution of our algorithm can be concluded as follows: 1) Considering the characteristics of SCIs, a valid network architecture is designed for both NR and FR visual quality evaluation of SCIs, which makes the networks learn the feature differences for FR-IQA; 2) with the consideration of correlation between local quality and DMOS, a training data selection method is proposed to fine-tune the pre-trained model with valid SCI patches; 3) an adaptive pooling approach is employed to fuse patch quality to obtain image quality, owns strong noise robust and effects on both FR and NR IQA. Experimental results verify that our model outperforms both current no-reference and full-reference image quality assessment methods on the benchmark screen content image quality assessment database (SIQAD). Cross-database evaluation shows high generalization ability and high effectiveness of our model.     

Image information and visual quality.

Measurement of visual quality is of fundamental importance to numerous image and video processing applications. The goal of quality assessment (QA) research is to design algorithms that can automatically assess the quality of images or videos in a perceptually consistent manner. Image QA algorithms generally interpret image quality as fidelity or similarity with a "reference" or "perfect" image in some perceptual space. Such "full-reference" QA methods attempt to achieve consistency in quality prediction by modeling salient physiological and psychovisual features of the human visual system (HVS), or by signal fidelity measures. In this paper, we approach the image QA problem as an information fidelity problem. Specifically, we propose to quantify the loss of image information to the distortion process and explore the relationship between image information and visual quality. QA systems are invariably involved with judging the visual quality of "natural" images and videos that are meant for "human consumption." Researchers have developed sophisticated models to capture the statistics of such natural signals. Using these models, we previously presented an information fidelity criterion for image QA that related image quality with the amount of information shared between a reference and a distorted image. In this paper, we propose an image information measure that quantifies the information that is present in the reference image and how much of this reference information can be extracted from the distorted image. Combining these two quantities, we propose a visual information fidelity measure for image QA. We validate the performance of our algorithm with an extensive subjective study involving 779 images and show that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art image QA algorithms by a sizeable margin in our simulations. The code and the data from the subjective study are available at the LIVE website.     

Research on the parallelization of image quality analysis algorithm based on deep learning

Image quality assessment is an indispensable in computer vision applications, such as image classification, image parsing. With the development of Internet, image data acquisition becomes more conveniently. However, image distortion is inevitable due to imperfect image acquisition system, image transmission medium and image recording equipment. Traditional image quality assessment algorithms only focus on low-level visual features such as color or texture, which could not encode high-level features effectively. CNN-based methods have shown satisfactory results in image quality assessment. However, existing methods have problems such as incomplete feature extraction, partial image block distortion, and inability to determine scores. So in this paper, we propose a novel framework for image quality assessment based on deep learning. We incorporate both low-level visual features and high-level semantic features to better describe images. And image quality is analyzed in a parallel processing mode. Experiments are conducted on LIVE and TID2008 datasets demonstrate the proposed model can predict the quality of the distorted image well, and both SROCC and PLCC can reach 0.92 or higher.     

A low-cost content-adaptive and rate-controllable near-losslessimage codec in DPCM domain

It remains an important issue for any image codec to optimize the balance between the reconstructed image quality and the rate-controllable compression ratio. A content adaptive information loss distribution scheme is proposed to design a low-cost and rate-controllable image codec. This design exploits the principle that any extra information loss required by the rate-control should be introduced only to those areas where the local texture analysis reveals that human visual perception is less sensitive to the incurred distortion. Therefore, while rate-distortion theory may enable us to optimize PSNR measurement of quality in rate control design, the proposed technique is able to optimize the perceptual quality of the reconstructed images. Experimental results are reported to support this statement for the performance of the proposed algorithm, benchmarked by the nonrate-controlled JPEG-LS.     

基于三维感知的立体虚拟视点图像质量评价方法

为了评价立体虚拟视点图像的质量,提出了一种基 于三维感知的客观评价方法。综合考虑了立体虚拟视点图像两大最主要失真类型:单视点绘 制失真和立体视点不匹配失真。针对单视点绘制失真,先提取 当前视点失真图与无失真图的差异性区域,再针对该差异性区域计算平均结构相似度(MSSIM ),最后将左 右视点平均池化作为单目纹理特征值;针对立体视点不匹配失真,先对左右视点失真图分别 进行视差映射, 再提取映射图与该视点失真图的差异区域作为双目不匹配区域,然后针对不匹配区域计算MS SIM 值,最 后将左右视点平均池化作为双目竞争特征值;最终将两个特征值幂次融合,作为最终的立体 虚拟视点图像 质量评价客观指标。实验结果表明本方法有效匹配主观打分的DMOS值,皮尔森线性相关系数 和斯皮尔曼 秩相关系数分别为0.911和0.900,正确反映了 立体虚拟视点图像质量。     

小波域结构相似度融合图像质量评价方法

针对融合图像质量评价问题,分析了图像质量评价与融合图像质量评价的关系,给出了融合图像质量评价方法的一般表达公式,指出构造实际并不存在的参考图像是解决融合图像质量评价问题的关键。在此基础上,基于空域结构相似度评价方法,对输入源图像和融合图像分别进行小波分解,利用输入源图像小波分解系数构造参考图像小波系数,然后根据人眼视觉敏感度带通特性对参考图像和融合图像的各小波频带进行加权,从而得到整幅图像的小波域结构相似度评价指标,利用目标可探测性、细节可分辨能力和图像整体舒适性构成主观评价指标分别和交互信息量、基于空域的结构相似度比较。实验结果表明,相比于传统的客观评价方法,提出的方法所得结果与主观评价结果的一致性更好。     

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.     

基于结构信息和像素失真的客观图像质量评价

为了度量多种失真类型的图像质量,根据人类视觉系统(HVS)对图像空域结构信息高度敏感和任一类型的失真都会产生像素失真理论,提出一种基于结构信息和像素失真的无参考的质量评价方法.该方法利用色彩信息提取能够表征图像结构信息的视觉内容结构图,并加权像素失真来度量图像质量,同时对部分失真类型进行修正.该方法不涉及任何参数设置也无需训练过程.实验结果表明,该方法能够较好地评价白噪声、JPEG压缩、高斯模糊、JPEG2000压缩和FastFading等失真图像的质量,并与主观评价方法有较好的一致性.     

No-reference image quality assessment using Prewitt magnitude based on convolutional neural networks

No-reference image quality assessment is of great importance to numerous image processing applications, and various methods have been widely studied with promising results. These methods exploit handcrafted features in the transformation or space domain that are discriminated for image degradations. However, abundant a priori knowledge is required to extract these handcrafted features. The convolutional neural network (CNN) is recently introduced into the no-reference image quality assessment, which integrates feature learning and regression into one optimization process. Therefore, the network structure generates an effective model for estimating image quality. However, the image quality score obtained by the CNN is based on the mean of all of the image patch scores without considering the human visual system, such as edges and contour of images. In this paper, we combine the CNN and the Prewitt magnitude of segmented images and obtain the image quality score using the mean of all the products of the image patch scores and weights based on the result of segmented images. Experimental results on various image distortion types demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves good performance.     

A new objective stereoscopic image assessment model based on stereoscopic perception

In order to establish a stereoscopic image quality assessment method which is consistent with human visual perception, we propose an objective stereoscopic image quality assessment method. It takes into account the strong correlation and high degree of structural between pixels of image. This method contains two models. One is the quality synthetic assessment of left-right view images, which is based on human visual characteristics, we use the Singular Value Decomposition （SVD） that can represent the degree of the distortion, and combine the qualities of left and right images by the characteristics of binocular superposition. The other model is stereoscopic perception quality as- sessment, due to strong stability of image＇s singular value characteristics, we calculate the distance of the singular values and structural characteristic similarity of the absolute difference maps, and utilize the statistical value of the global error to evaluate stereoscopic perception. Finally, we combine two models to describe the stereoscopic image quality. Experimental results show that the correlation coefficients of the proposed assessment method and the human subjective perception are above 0.93, and the mean square errors are all less than 6.2, under JPEG, JP2K compression, Gaussian blurring, Gaussian white noise, H.264 coding distortion, and hybrid cross distortion. It indicates that the proposed stereoscopic objective method is consistent with human visual properties and also of availability.     

A reference-free underwater image quality assessment metric in frequency domain

Owing to the complexity of the underwater environment and the limitations of imaging devices, the quality of underwater images varies differently, which may affect the practical applications in modern military, scientific research, and other fields. Thus, achieving subjective quality assessment to distinguish different qualities of underwater images has an important guiding role for subsequent tasks. In this paper, considering the underwater image degradation effect and human visual perception scheme, an effective reference-free underwater image quality assessment metric is designed by combining the colorfulness, contrast, and sharpness cues. Specifically, inspired by the different sensibility of humans to high-frequency and low-frequency information, we design a more comprehensive color measurement in spatial domain and frequency domain. In addition, for the low contrast caused by the backward scattering, we propose a dark channel prior weighted contrast measure to enhance the discrimination ability of the original contrast measurement. The sharpness measurement is used to evaluate the blur effect caused by the forward scattering of the underwater image. Finally, these three measurements are combined by the weighted summation, where the weighed coefficients are obtained by multiple linear regression. Moreover, we collect a large dataset for underwater image quality assessment for testing and evaluating different methods. Experiments on this dataset demonstrate the superior performance both qualitatively and quantitatively.     

Reduced reference image quality assessment based on dual derivative priors

A novel reduced reference image quality assessment method is described. Natural images obey very specific distributions in the gradient domain, where some statistical features of the reference image are extracted and sent to the receiver side. The distortion measure for the distorted image is defined by a comparison of these features. The proposed method is generally aimed at all distortion types. Experimental results show that the method performs well compared with other popular methods.