Reduced-reference image quality assessment using moment method

Reduced-reference image quality assessment (RR IQA) aims to evaluate the perceptual quality of a distorted image through partial information of the corresponding reference image. In this paper, a novel RR IQA metric is proposed by using the moment method. We claim that the first and second moments of wavelet coefficients of natural images can have approximate and regular change that are disturbed by different types of distortions, and that this disturbance can be relevant to human perceptions of quality. We measure the difference of these statistical parameters between reference and distorted image to predict the visual quality degradation. The introduced IQA metric is suitable for implementation and has relatively low computational complexity. The experimental results on Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE) and Tampere Image Database (TID) image databases indicate that the proposed metric has a good predictive performance.     

MLSIM: A Multi-Level Similarity index for image quality assessment

Image quality assessment (IQA) is of great importance to numerous image processing applications, and various methods have been proposed for it. In this paper, a Multi-Level Similarity (MLSIM) index for full reference IQA is proposed. The proposed metric is based on the fact that human visual system (HVS) distinguishes the quality of an image mainly according to the details given by low-level gradient information. In the proposed metric, the Prewitt operator is first utilized to get gradient information of both reference and distorted images, then the gradient information of reference image is segmented into three levels (3LSIM) or two levels (2LSIM), and the gradient information of distorted image is segmented by the corresponding regions of reference image, therefore we get multi-level information of these two images. Riesz transform is utilized to get corresponding features of different levels and the corresponding 1st-order and 2nd-order coefficients are combined together by regional mutual information (RMI) and weighted to obtain a single quality score. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed metric is highly consistent with human subjective evaluations and achieves good performance.     

一种基于小波分析的部分参考型图像质量评价方法

部分参考型图像质量客观评价方法已经成为图像质量评价领域研究的热点之一。该文利用视觉感知特性,通过统计图像经小波分解后视觉感知系数在各子带中的变化情况,提出了一种基于小波分解的部分参考型图像质量评价方法。该方法与经典的RR-WISM(Reduced-Reference image quality assessment using Wavelet-domain natural Image Statistic Model)方法相比,主观感知的相关系数平均提高3%,主观感知的离出率平均降低6%,传输数据量减少50%,计算代价大大降低。实验结果表明提出的方法与主观感知有很好的一致性。     

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.     

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.     

RRED indices: reduced reference entropic differencing for image quality assessment

We study the problem of automatic "reduced-reference" image quality assessment (QA) algorithms from the point of view of image information change. Such changes are measured between the reference- and natural-image approximations of the distorted image. Algorithms that measure differences between the entropies of wavelet coefficients of reference and distorted images, as perceived by humans, are designed. The algorithms differ in the data on which the entropy difference is calculated and on the amount of information from the reference that is required for quality computation, ranging from almost full information to almost no information from the reference. A special case of these is algorithms that require just a single number from the reference for QA. The algorithms are shown to correlate very well with subjective quality scores, as demonstrated on the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering Image Quality Assessment Database and the Tampere Image Database. Performance degradation, as the amount of information is reduced, is also studied.     

No-reference image quality assessment using statistical characterization in the shearlet domain

Image and video quality measurements are crucial for many applications, such as acquisition, compression, transmission, enhancement, and reproduction. Nowadays, no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) methods have drawn extensive attention because it does not rely on any information of original images. However, most of the conventional NR-IQA methods are designed only for one or a set of predefined specific image distortion types, which are unlikely to generalize for evaluating image/video distorted with other types of distortions. In order to estimate a wide range of image distortions, in this paper, we present an efficient general-purpose NR-IQA algorithm which is based on a new multiscale directional transform (shearlet transform) with a strong ability to localize distributed discontinuities. This is mainly based on distorted natural image that leads to significant variation in the spread discontinuities in all directions. Thus, the statistical property of the distorted image is significantly different from that of natural images in fine scale shearlet coefficients, which are referred to as ‘distorted parts’. However, some ‘natural parts’ are reserved in coarse scale shearlet coefficients. The algorithm relies on utilizing the natural parts to predict the natural behavior of distorted parts. The predicted parts act as ‘reference’ and the difference between the reference and distorted parts is used as an indicator to predict the image quality. In order to achieve this goal, we modify the general sparse autoencoder to serve as a predictor to get the predicted parts from natural parts. By translating the NR-IQA problem into classification problem, the predicted parts and distorted parts are utilized to form features and the differences between them are identified by softmax classifier. The resulting algorithm, which we name SHeArlet based No-reference Image quality Assessment (SHANIA), is tested on several database (LIVE, Multiply Distorted LIVE and TID2008) and shown to be suitable for many common distortions, consistent with subjective assessment and comparable to full-reference IQA methods and state-of-the-art general purpose NR-IQA algorithms.     

Unsupervised blind image quality assessment based on joint structure and natural scene statistics features

Compared with the widely used supervised blind image quality assessment (BIQA) models, unsupervised BIQA models require little prior knowledge for calculating the objective quality scores of distorted images. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised BIQA method that aims to achieve both good performance and generalization capability with low computational complexity. Carefully selected and extensive structure and natural scene statistics (NSS) features can better represent image quality. First, we employ phase congruency (PC) and finely selected gradient magnitude map and Laplacian of Gaussian response (GM-LOG) features to represent image structure information. Second, we calculate the local mean-subtracted and contrast-normalized (MSCN) coefficients and the Karhunen–Loéve transform (KLT) coefficients to represent the naturalness of the distorted images. Last, multivariate Gaussian (MVG) model with joint features extracted from both the pristine images and the distorted images is adopted to calculate the objective image quality. Extensive experiments conducted on nine IQA databases demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art BIQA methods.     

基于频率、空间和方向的图像质量评估

将空间域图像质量评价方法结构相似度SSIM推广到HWD变换域,结合人眼视觉倾斜效应和粒子群优化算法,提出一种新的图像质量评价测度。将SSIM直接用于各HWD分解频带,用频带相关性图加权各频带的结构相似度得到局部质量,然后对不同方向的局部质量求加权和得到整幅图像的结构相似度。实验结果表明,该测度与主观感知有较好的一致性,能准确地反映人眼对图像的视觉感知。     

Image quality assessment using block-based weighted SVD

Image quality is an important challenge in image processing. The quality measures should be designed in the direction where the correlation between the mathematical evaluation and subjective evaluation is high. We propose a new image quality assessment relying on block-based singular vectors. The corresponded distorted blocks are projected onto the singular vector matrices of the original blocks. These projection coefficients are the main quality attribute. The algorithm is further developed into the reduced reference method. Eigenvectors of the covariance matrix of all original blocks are used as the constant basis to compute the projecting coefficients of all original and distorted blocks. Simulation results on different databases with various distortion types and comparison to state-of-the-art methods show the proposed method in most cases gives the best correlation with human evaluation.     

Reduced reference image quality assessment using regularity of phase congruency

In this paper, a reduced-reference image quality assessment metric is proposed, which measures the difference of the regularity of the phase congruency (PC) between the reference image and the distorted image. The proposed model adopts a three-stage approach. The PC of the image is first extracted, then the fractal dimensions are computed on PC as the image features that characterize the image structures from the view of the spatial distribution. Finally the image features are pooled as the quality score using ℓ₁ distance. The proposed approach is evaluated on seven public benchmark databases. Experimental results have demonstrated the excellent performance of the proposed approach.     

Image quality assessment: from error visibility to structural similarity

Objective methods for assessing perceptual image quality traditionally attempted to quantify the visibility of errors (differences) between a distorted image and a reference image using a variety of known properties of the human visual system. Under the assumption that human visual perception is highly adapted for extracting structural information from a scene, we introduce an alternative complementary framework for quality assessment based on the degradation of structural information. As a specific example of this concept, we develop a Structural Similarity Index and demonstrate its promise through a set of intuitive examples, as well as comparison to both subjective ratings and state-of-the-art objective methods on a database of images compressed with JPEG and JPEG2000.     

Video quality measurement based on 3-D. Singular value decomposition

This paper presents a new full reference Video Quality Assessment (VQA) method based on using 3 Dimensional Singular Value Decomposition (3-D SVD). The method compares the structural properties and the luminance characteristics between the reference and the distorted videos. This aim is obtained by applying 3-D SVD that is singular value decomposition in a 3-D space. In principal, the distorted and the original videos are projected on the singular vectors of the original video. The weighted difference between the reflections coefficients could be considered to quantify the quality of videos. For our experiments, we have used the LIVE and EPFL-PoliMI video quality databases to evaluate the performance of our metric. The results show a great correlation between the measure scores and the subjective scores.     

基于窗口经验模式分解的医学图像增强

提出了基于窗口经验模式分解(WEMD)的医学图像增强算法。用WEMD算法分解医学图像,能够自适应地提取图像的内涵模式函数(IMF)分量。利用IMF分量图像的直方图服从正态分布的特性,结合直方图匹配算法的增强能力处理前几个IMF分量,经处理的IMF分量中的高频细节信息得到增强。将处理后的IMF分量和剩余分量重构,获取增强的医学图像。实验表明,WEMD算法增强效果优于目前的图像增强算法。     

Image quality assessment based on Prewitt magnitude

The goal of image quality assessment (IQA) research is to use computational models to calculate the quality of images consistently with subjective evaluations. In this paper, we propose a new image quality assessment (IQA) algorithm by combining Prewitt magnitude and regional mutual information (RMI) in HSV color space. The Prewitt operator is usually used for edge detection and can extract vertical edge more accurately than other operators. The HSV color space encapsulates information about a color in terms that are more natural and intuitive to humans. The proposed method PMRMI first transforms reference and distorted images from RGB color space into HSV color space and Prewitt magnitude is introduced to extract key edge features of each channel. Then the regional mutual information is calculated to measure the similarity of the two images. After that, a weighting method is utilized for better consistency with subjective evaluations. Therefore we get a single quality score. Experiments on various image distortion types demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve better consistency with the subjective evaluations than PSNR and SSIM.     

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.     

Image database TID2013: Peculiarities,results and perspectives

This paper describes a recently created image database, TID2013, intended for evaluation of full-reference visual quality assessment metrics. With respect to TID2008, the new database contains a larger number (3000) of test images obtained from 25 reference images, 24 types of distortions for each reference image, and 5 levels for each type of distortion. Motivations for introducing 7 new types of distortions and one additional level of distortions are given; examples of distorted images are presented. Mean opinion scores (MOS) for the new database have been collected by performing 985 subjective experiments with volunteers (observers) from five countries (Finland, France, Italy, Ukraine, and USA). The availability of MOS allows the use of the designed database as a fundamental tool for assessing the effectiveness of visual quality. Furthermore, existing visual quality metrics have been tested with the proposed database and the collected results have been analyzed using rank order correlation coefficients between MOS and considered metrics. These correlation indices have been obtained both considering the full set of distorted images and specific image subsets, for highlighting advantages and drawbacks of existing, state of the art, quality metrics. Approaches to thorough performance analysis for a given metric are presented to detect practical situations or distortion types for which this metric is not adequate enough to human perception. The created image database and the collected MOS values are freely available for downloading and utilization for scientific purposes.     

Sparse representation-based image quality assessment

A highly promising approach to assess the quality of an image involves comparing the perceptually important structural information in this image with that in its reference image. The extraction of the perceptually important structural information is however a challenging task. This paper employs a sparse representation-based approach to extract such structural information. It proposes a new metric called the sparse representation-based quality (SPARQ) index that measures the visual quality of an image. The proposed approach learns the inherent structures of the reference image as a set of basis vectors. These vectors are obtained such that any structure in the image can be efficiently represented by a linear combination of only a few of these basis vectors. Such a sparse strategy is known to generate basis vectors that are qualitatively similar to the receptive field of the simple cells present in the mammalian primary visual cortex. To estimate the visual quality of the distorted image, structures in the visually important areas in this image are compared with those in the reference image, in terms of the learnt basis vectors. Our approach is evaluated on six publicly available subject-rated image quality assessment datasets. The proposed SPARQ index consistently exhibits high correlation with the subjective ratings of all datasets and overall, performs better than a number of popular image quality metrics.     

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.