No-reference image quality assessment based on the AdaBoost BP neural network in the wavelet domain

Considering the relatively poor robustness of quality scores for different types of distortion and the lack of mechanism for determining distortion types, a no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) method based on the AdaBoost BP Neural Network in Wavelet domain (WABNN) is proposed. A 36-dimensional image feature vector is constructed by extracting natural scene statistics (NSS) features and local information entropy features of the distorted image wavelet sub-band coefficients in three scales. The ABNN classifier is obtained by learning the relationship between image features and distortion types. The ABNN scorer is obtained by learning the relationship between image features and image quality scores. A series of contrast experiments are carried out in the LIVE database and TID2013 database. Experimental results show the high accuracy of the distinguishing distortion type, the high consistency with subjective scores and the high robustness of the method for distorted images. Experiment results also show the independence for the database and the relatively high operation efficiency of this method

Learning to Predict Image-based Rendering Artifacts with Respect to a Hidden Reference Image

Image metrics predict the perceived per-pixel difference between a reference image and its degraded (e. g., re-rendered) version. In several important applications, the reference image is not available and image metrics cannot be applied. We devise a neural network architecture and training procedure that allows predicting the MSE, SSIM or VGG16 image difference from the distorted image alone while the reference is not observed. This is enabled by two insights: The first is to inject sufficiently many un-distorted natural image patches, which can be found in arbitrary amounts and are known to have no perceivable difference to themselves. This avoids false positives. The second is to balance the learning, where it is carefully made sure that all image errors are equally likely, avoiding false negatives. Surprisingly, we observe, that the resulting no-reference metric, subjectively, can even perform better than the reference-based one, as it had to become robust against mis-alignments. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach in an image-based rendering context, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, we demonstrate two applications which reduce light field capture time and provide guidance for interactive depth adjustment.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure