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.     

No-reference image quality assessment in complex-shearlet domain

The field of image quality measure (IQM) is growing rapidly in recent years. In particular, there was a significant progress in no-reference (NR) IQM methods. Natural scenes have certain statistical properties which vary in the presence of distortion. The statistical changes represent the loss of naturalness and can be efficiently quantified using shearlet transformation of images. In this paper, a general-purpose NR IQM approach is proposed based on the statistical characteristics of natural images in shearlet domain. The method utilizes a set of distortion-sensitive features extracted from statistical properties of shearlet coefficients. Phase and amplitude of an image contain important perceptual information; therefore, a complex version of the shearlet transform is employed to take advantage of phase and amplitude features in quality estimation. In quality prediction step, the features are used to train image classification and quality prediction models using a support vector machine. The experimental results show that the proposed NR IQM is highly correlated with subjective assessment and outperforms several full-reference and state-of-art NR IQMs.     

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.     

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.     

基于支持向量回归的无参考模糊和噪声图像质量评价方法

基于支持向量回归(SVR)和图像奇异值分解,提出了一种新的无参考(NR,no-reference)模糊和噪声图像质量评价(IQA)方法。首先通过对待评价图像进行高斯低通滤波生成再模糊图像,然后分别对它们进行奇异值分解并计算奇异值的改变量,最后使用奇异值的改变量作为SVR的输入,训练预并测得到图像的质量评分。在3个公开的模糊和噪声数据库上的实验结果表明,新方法预测得分与主观得分有较好的一致性,获得了较好的评价指标;对于模糊失真类型和噪声失真类型,在LIVE2数据库上的性能评价指标斯皮尔曼等级相关系数(SROCC)分别达到0.961 3和0.965 9。     

A weighted full-reference image quality assessment based on visual saliency

In full reference image quality assessment (IQA), the images without distortion are usually employed as reference, while the structures in both reference images and distorted images are ignored and all pixels are equally treated. In addition, the role of human visual system (HVS) is not taken account into subjective IQA metric. In this paper, a weighted full-reference image quality metric is proposed, where a weight imposed on each pixel indicates its importance in IQA. Furthermore, the weights can be estimated via visual saliency computation, which can approximate the subjective IQA via exploiting the HVS. In the experiments, the proposed metric is compared with several objective IQA metrics on LIVE release 2 and TID 2008 database. The results demonstrate that SROCC and PLCC of the proposed metric are 0.9647 and 0.9721, respectively,which are higher than other methods and it only takes 427.5 s, which is lower than that of most other methods.     

Screen content image quality assessment based on convolutional neural networks

Screen content image (SCI) is a composite image including textual and pictorial regions resulting in many difficulties in image quality assessment (IQA). Large SCIs are divided into image patches to increase training samples for CNN training of IQA model, and this brings two problems: (1) local quality of each image patch is not equal to subjective differential mean opinion score (DMOS) of an entire image; (2) importance of different image patches is not same for quality assessment. In this paper, we propose a novel no-reference (NR) IQA model based on the convolutional neural network (CNN) for assessing the perceptual quality of SCIs. Our model conducts two designs solving problems which benefits from two strategies. For the first strategy, to imitate full-reference (FR) CNN-based model behavior, a CNN-based model is designed for both FR and NR IQA, and performance of NR-IQA part improves when the image patch scores predicted by FR-IQA part are adopted as the ground-truth to train NR-IQA part. For the second strategy, image patch qualities of one entire SCI are fused to obtain the SCI quality with an adaptive weighting method taking account the effect of the different image patch contents. Experimental results verify that our model outperforms all test NR IQA methods and most FR IQA methods on the screen content image quality assessment database (SIQAD). On the cross-database evaluation, the proposed method outperforms the existing NR IQA method in terms of at least 2.4 percent in PLCC and 2.8 percent in SRCC, which shows high generalization ability and high effectiveness of our model.     

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.     

No-reference quality assessment for DCT-based compressed image

A blind/no-reference (NR) method is proposed in this paper for image quality assessment (IQA) of the images compressed in discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain. When an image is measured by structural similarity (SSIM), two variances, i.e. mean intensity and variance of the image, are used as features. However, the parameters of original copies are actually unavailable in NR applications; hence SSIM is not widely applicable. To extend SSIM in general cases, we apply Gaussian model to fit quantization noise in spatial domain, and directly estimate noise distribution from the compressed version. Benefit from this rearrangement, the revised SSIM does not require original image as the reference. Heavy compression always results in some zero-value DCT coefficients, which need to be compensated for more accurate parameter estimate. By studying the quantization process, a machine-learning based algorithm is proposed to estimate quantization noise taking image content into consideration. Compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, the proposed IQA is more heuristic and efficient. With some experimental results, we verify that the proposed algorithm (provided no reference image) achieves comparable efficacy to some full reference (FR) methods (provided the reference image), such as SSIM.     

互补色小波域图像质量盲评价方法

图像色彩空间的RGB通道具有密切的关系,图像质量的改变会改变这样的关系.然而传统图像质量评价方法大多基于灰度图像统计特性,忽略了颜色通道间关系信息.为充分利用颜色信息,本文基于新近提出的互补色小波变换提出一种图像质量盲评价方法.文章建立了图像互补色域自然场景统计、多尺度和方向性能量分布等模型.分析表明：这些模型不仅涵盖了传统灰度方法所能描述的信息,而且还能借助于互补色来有效表示彩色图像各通道之间的信息联系,提供表征图像质量的一组高效特征.基于这些特征,我们提出的图像质量盲评价的方法能有效提取图像的失真统计特征,能给出与人眼主观评价图像质量结果保持高度一致、优于现有文献报道盲方法、且可与非盲（全参考）方法相比拟的评价结果.     

一种基于最小可察觉失真的立体图像质量客观评价方法

立体图像质量是评价立体视频系统性能的有效途径,而如何利用人类视觉特性对立体图像质量进行有效的评价是目前的研究难点。本文通过分析最小可察觉失真(JND,just noticeable distortion)视觉感知模型,并结合反映图像结构信息的奇异值矢量,提出了一种基于JND的立体图像质量客观评价方法。评价方法由图像质量评价和深度感知评价两部分组成,首先提取反映图像质量和深度感知的特征信息作为立体图像特征信息,然后根据立体图像的不同失真类型情况对其特征进行融合,通过支持向量回归(SVR,support vector Regression)预测得出立体图像质量的客观评价值。实验结果表明,采用本文提出的客观评价方法对立体数据测试库进行评价,在不同失真类型或混合失真评价结果中,Pearson线性相关系数(CC)值均在0.94以上,Spearman等级相关系数(SROCC)值均在0.92以上,符合人眼视觉特性,能够很好地预测人眼对立体图像的主观感知。     

基于双目能量响应的无参考立体图像质量评价

为了实现对不同失真类型立体图像的质量评价,提出了一种基于双目能量响应的无参考立体图像质量评价(NR-IAQ)方法。首先,通过对各失真图像进行Gabor滤波,提取出不同频率、不同方向、不同视差响应下的局部特征矢量,作为立体图像特征信息;然后,利用支持向量回归(SVR)建立立体图像特征与主观评价值的关系,从而预测得到立体图像质量的客观评价值。实验结果表明,对于NBU-3D测试库,Pearson线性相关系数值在0.92以上,Spearman等级相关系数值在0.93以上;对于LIVE-3D测试库,Pearson线性相关系数值在0.96以上,Spearman等级相关系数值在0.96以上;与现有的全参考(FR)和(NR)质量评价方法相比,本方法得到的客观评价值与主观评价结果有较好的相关性,更加符合人眼视觉系统。     

A usability-based subjective remote sensing image quality assessment database

The current rate of success in launching satellites and advances in onboard and ground image processing have led to a dramatic increase in the scale of remote sensing image data. This has resulted in considerable research on how to provide the best quality of experience to end users. However, subjective image quality assessment (IQA) is time-consuming, cumbersome, expensive and cannot be implemented automatically using computers. Thus, subjective IQA may not be suitable for application requirements. In this paper, we design and construct a usability-based subjective remote sensing IQA database. A corresponding no-reference IQA method is also proposed. The new IQA method uses scale-invariant feature transforms to form a dictionary and then a support vector machine to obtain an IQA model. The experimental results show that the new subjective IQA database is highly suited to the task, and the quality predictions of the new IQA method correlate well with human subjective scores in the new database.     

基于局部最大梯度的无参考图像质量评价

图像质量评价在数字图像处理中应用广泛,无参考图像质量评价更是近些年来的研究热点。该文提出一种基于局部结构的无参考图像质量评价方法,该方法首先利用局部梯度选择强边缘区域,然后通过强边缘的信息来评价图像的质量。该方法的创新之处在于：基于局部最大梯度的像素点质量评价;利用强边缘点的局部质量来估计全局图像质量。该方法可以同时评价噪声图像和模糊图像,图像失真越严重,该方法的评价分数就越低。与图像质量评价数据库的主观评价结果比较表明,该文方法与主观评价结果相关性很强,能很好地反映图像质量的视觉感知效果。     

Image quality assessment using a SVD-based structural projection

The development of objective image quality assessment (IQA) metrics aligned with human perception is of fundamental importance to numerous image-processing applications. Recently, human visual system (HVS)-based engineering algorithms have received widespread attention for their low computational complexity and good performance. In this paper, we propose a new IQA model by incorporating these available engineering principles. A local singular value decomposition (SVD) is first utilised as a structural projection tool to select local image distortion features, and then, both perceptual spatial pooling and neural networks (NN) are employed to combine feature vectors to predict a single perceptual quality score. Extensive experiments and cross-validations conducted with three publicly available IQA databases demonstrate the accuracy, consistency, robustness, and stability of the proposed approach compared to state-of-the-art IQA methods, such as Visual Information Fidelity (VIF), Visual Signal to Noise Ratio (VSNR), and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM).     

Image quality/distortion metric based on α-stable model similarity in wavelet domain

Quality assessment is of central importance in numerous image processing tasks. State-of-the-art objective image quality assessment (IQA) algorithms are generally devised for specific distortion types or based on training procedure of large databases. In this work, we propose a general-purpose full-reference/no-reference (FR/NR) IQA framework for image distortions, nominated by Image Quality/Distortion Metric (IQDM). The leptokurtic and heavy-tailed behaviors of image wavelet coefficients are characterized by symmetric α-stable (SαS) density, and the statistical studies indicate that the model parameters may be altered because of the presence of distortion. This important priori knowledge of original image’s distribution is then used to gauge the distortion between degraded and reference SαS models in multi-scale wavelet sub-bands. We investigate the relationship between original and degraded parameters over scales, accordingly infer the original parameters from the degraded ones. A characteristic probability density function for SαS and its closed-form Kullback–Leibler distance are derived for FR/NR-IQDM using the model parameters. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that the proposed FR/NR-IQDM scheme is efficacious to most common types of distortion, and leads to a highly comparable performance to the benchmarks and prevalent competitors in consistency with subjective judgements.     

Blind image quality assessment using a reciprocal singular value curve

The reciprocal singular value curves of natural images resemble inverse power functions. The bending degree of the reciprocal singular value curve varies with distortion type and severity. We describe two new general blind image quality assessment (IQA) indices that respectively use the area and curvature of image reciprocal singular value curves. These two methods almost require very little prior knowledge of any image or distortion nor any process of training, and they can handle multiple unknown distortions, hence they are no-training methods. Experimental results on five simulated databases show that the proposed algorithms deliver quality predictions that have high correlation with human subjective judgments, and that are competitive with other blind IQA models.     

基于血管分割的视网膜图像无参考质量评价方法

为了研究不同失真类型和不同失真程度对血管分割 的影 响,本文将图像的失真类型和失真程度量化为图像血管分割精确度,由于现有公开库中包含 血管分割标签 的图像中均为低失真甚至无失真图像,因此本文构建了一个视网膜失真图像数据库,共包含 2种失真类型, 每种失真类型的图像均有8个等级的失真程度,共552幅视网膜失真图像,并将每幅失真图 像对应的血管 分割精确度作为该图像的标签。此外,本文提出了一种基于血管分割方法的视网膜图像无参 考质量评价方 法,通过提取视网膜图像的像素值统计特征、图像纹理特征以及血管形状特征得到最终视网 膜图像的质量。 在提出的数据库上测试结果显示,皮尔逊线性相关系数值高于0.96, 斯皮尔曼等级相关系数值高于0.95。 与现有评价方法相比,该方法优于传统的无参考评价方法,更能够客观的反映不同失真图像 对血管分割这一应用的影响。