Sparse representation based stereoscopic image quality assessment accounting for perceptual cognitive process

In this paper, we propose a sparse representation based Reduced-Reference Image Quality Assessment (RR-IQA) index for stereoscopic images from the following two perspectives: 1) Human visual system (HVS) always tries to infer the meaningful information and reduces uncertainty from the visual stimuli, and the entropy of primitive (EoP) can well describe this visual cognitive progress when perceiving natural images. 2) Ocular dominance (also known as binocularity) which represents the interaction between two eyes is quantified by the sparse representation coefficients. Inspired by previous research, the perception and understanding of an image is considered as an active inference process determined by the level of “surprise”, which can be described by EoP. Therefore, the primitives learnt from natural images can be utilized to evaluate the visual information by computing entropy. Meanwhile, considering the binocularity in stereo image quality assessment, a feasible way is proposed to characterize this binocular process according to the sparse representation coefficients of each view. Experimental results on LIVE 3D image databases and MCL database further demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves high consistency with subjective evaluation

Quality index for stereoscopic images by jointly evaluating cyclopean amplitude and cyclopean phase

With widespread applications of three-dimensional (3-D) technology, measuring quality of experience for 3-D multimedia content plays an increasingly important role. In this paper, we propose a full reference stereo image quality assessment (SIQA) framework which focuses on the innovation of binocular visual properties and applications of low-level features. On one hand, based on the fact that human visual system understands an image mainly according to its low-level features, local phase and local amplitude extracted from phase congruency measurement are employed as primary features. Considering the less prominent performance of amplitude in IQA, visual saliency is applied into the modification on amplitude. On the other hand, by fully considering binocular rivalry phenomena, we create the cyclopean amplitude map and cyclopean phase map. With this method, both image features and binocular visual properties are mutually combined with each other. Meanwhile, a novel binocular modulation function in spatial domain is also adopted into the overall quality prediction of amplitude and phase. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves higher consistency with subjective tests than relevant SIQA metrics

Blind assessment for stereo images considering binocular characteristics and deep perception map based on deep belief network

© 2018 Elsevier Inc. In recent years, blind image quality assessment in the field of 2D image/video has gained the popularity, but its applications in 3D image/video are to be generalized. In this paper, we propose an effective blind metric evaluating stereo images via deep belief network (DBN). This method is based on wavelet transform with both 2D features from monocular images respectively as image content description and 3D features from a novel depth perception map (DPM) as depth perception description. In particular, the DPM is introduced to quantify longitudinal depth information to align with human stereo visual perception. More specifically, the 2D features are local histogram of oriented gradient (HoG) features from high frequency wavelet coefficients and global statistical features including magnitude, variance and entropy. Meanwhile, the global statistical features from the DPM are characterized as 3D features. Subsequently, considering binocular characteristics, an effective binocular weight model based on multiscale energy estimation of the left and right images is adopted to obtain the content quality. In the training and testing stages, three DBN models for the three types features separately are used to get the final score. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed stereo image quality evaluation model has high superiority over existing methods and achieve higher consistency with subjective quality assessments

Quality assessment metric of stereo images considering cyclopean integration and visual saliency

In recent years, there has been great progress in the wider use of three-dimensional (3D) technologies. With increasing sources of 3D content, a useful tool is needed to evaluate the perceived quality of the 3D videos/images. This paper puts forward a framework to evaluate the quality of stereoscopic images contaminated by possible symmetric or asymmetric distortions. Human visual system (HVS) studies reveal that binocular combination models and visual saliency are the two key factors for the stereoscopic image quality assessment (SIQA) metric. Therefore inspired by such findings in HVS, this paper proposes a novel saliency map in SIQA metric for the cyclopean image called “cyclopean saliency”, which avoids complex calculations and produces good results in detecting saliency regions. Moreover, experimental results show that our metric significantly outperforms conventional 2D quality metrics and yields higher correlations with human subjective judgment than the state-of-art SIQA metrics. 3D saliency performance is also compared with “cyclopean saliency” in SIQA. It is noticed that the proposed metric is applicable to both symmetric and asymmetric distortions. It can thus be concluded that the proposed SIQA metric can provide an effective evaluation tool to assess stereoscopic image quality

A blind stereoscopic image quality evaluator with segmented stacked autoencoders considering the whole visual perception route

Most of the current blind stereoscopic image quality assessment (SIQA) algorithms cannot show reliable accuracy. One reason is that they do not have the deep architectures and the other reason is that they are designed on the relatively weak biological basis, compared with findings on human visual system (HVS). In this paper, we propose a Deep Edge and COlor Signal INtegrity Evaluator (DECOSINE) based on the whole visual perception route from eyes to the frontal lobe, and especially focus on edge and color signal processing in retinal ganglion cells (RGC) and lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). Furthermore, to model the complex and deep structure of the visual cortex, Segmented Stacked Auto-encoder (S-SAE) is used, which has not utilized for SIQA before. The utilization of the S-SAE complements weakness of deep learning-based SIQA metrics that require a very long training time. Experiments are conducted on popular SIQA databases, and the superiority of DECOSINE in terms of prediction accuracy and monotonicity is proved. The experimental results show that our model about the whole visual perception route and utilization of S-SAE are effective for SIQA

Binocular Rivalry Oriented Predictive Auto-Encoding Network for Blind Stereoscopic Image Quality Measurement

Stereoscopic image quality measurement (SIQM) has become increasingly important for guiding stereo image processing and commutation systems due to the widespread usage of 3D contents. Compared with conventional methods which are relied on hand-crafted features, deep learning oriented measurements have achieved remarkable performance in recent years. However, most existing deep SIQM evaluators are not specifically built for stereoscopic contents and consider little prior domain knowledge of the 3D human visual system (HVS) in network design. In this paper, we develop a Predictive Auto-encoDing Network (PAD-Net) for blind/No-Reference stereoscopic image quality measurement. In the first stage, inspired by the predictive coding theory that the cognition system tries to match bottom-up visual signal with top-down predictions, we adopt the encoder-decoder architecture to reconstruct the distorted inputs. Besides, motivated by the binocular rivalry phenomenon, we leverage the likelihood and prior maps generated from the predictive coding process in the Siamese framework for assisting SIQM. In the second stage, quality regression network is applied to the fusion image for acquiring the perceptual quality prediction. The performance of PAD-Net has been extensively evaluated on three benchmark databases and the superiority has been well validated on both symmetrically and asymmetrically distorted stereoscopic images under various distortion types

Stereoscopic image quality assessment method based on binocular combination saliency model

The objective quality assessment of stereoscopic images plays an important role in three-dimensional (3D) technologies. In this paper, we propose an effective method to evaluate the quality of stereoscopic images that are afflicted by symmetric distortions. The major technical contribution of this paper is that the binocular combination behaviours and human 3D visual saliency characteristics are both considered. In particular, a new 3D saliency map is developed, which not only greatly reduces the computational complexity by avoiding calculation of the depth information, but also assigns appropriate weights to the image contents. Experimental results indicate that the proposed metric not only significantly outperforms conventional 2D quality metrics, but also achieves higher performance than the existing 3D quality assessment models