Quantifying image distortion based on Gabor filter bank and multiple regression analysis

Image quality assessment is indispensable for image-based applications. The approaches towards image quality assessment fall into two main categories: subjective and objective methods. Subjective assessment has been widely used. However, careful subjective assessments are experimentally difficult and lengthy, and the results obtained may vary depending on the test conditions. On the other hand, objective image quality assessment would not only alleviate the difficulties described above but would also help to expand the application field. Therefore, several works have been developed for quantifying the distortion presented on a image achieving goodness of fit between subjective and objective scores up to 92%. Nevertheless, current methodologies are designed assuming that the nature of the distortion is known. Generally, this is a limiting assumption for practical applications, since in a majority of cases the distortions in the image are unknown. Therefore, we believe that the current methods of image quality assessment should be adapted in order to identify and quantify the distortion of images at the same time. That combination can improve processes such as enhancement, restoration, compression, transmission, among others. We present an approach based on the power of the experimental design and the joint localization of the Gabor filters for studying the influence of the spatial/frequencies on image quality assessment. Therefore, we achieve a correct identification and quantification of the distortion affecting images. This method provides accurate scores and differentiability between distortions

A Detail Based Method for Linear Full Reference Image Quality Prediction

In this paper, a novel Full Reference method is proposed for image quality assessment, using the combination of two separate metrics to measure the perceptually distinct impact of detail losses and of spurious details. To this purpose, the gradient of the impaired image is locally decomposed as a predicted version of the original gradient, plus a gradient residual. It is assumed that the detail attenuation identifies the detail loss, whereas the gradient residuals describe the spurious details. It turns out that the perceptual impact of detail losses is roughly linear with the loss of the positional Fisher information, while the perceptual impact of the spurious details is roughly proportional to a logarithmic measure of the signal to residual ratio. The affine combination of these two metrics forms a new index strongly correlated with the empirical Differential Mean Opinion Score (DMOS) for a significant class of image impairments, as verified for three independent popular databases. The method allowed alignment and merging of DMOS data coming from these different databases to a common DMOS scale by affine transformations. Unexpectedly, the DMOS scale setting is possible by the analysis of a single image affected by additive noise.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures. Copyright notice: The paper has been accepted for publication on the IEEE Trans. on Image Processing on 19/09/2017 and the copyright has been transferred to the IEE

A statistical reduced-reference method for color image quality assessment

Although color is a fundamental feature of human visual perception, it has been largely unexplored in the reduced-reference (RR) image quality assessment (IQA) schemes. In this paper, we propose a natural scene statistic (NSS) method, which efficiently uses this information. It is based on the statistical deviation between the steerable pyramid coefficients of the reference color image and the degraded one. We propose and analyze the multivariate generalized Gaussian distribution (MGGD) to model the underlying statistics. In order to quantify the degradation, we develop and evaluate two measures based respectively on the Geodesic distance between two MGGDs and on the closed-form of the Kullback Leibler divergence. We performed an extensive evaluation of both metrics in various color spaces (RGB, HSV, CIELAB and YCrCb) using the TID 2008 benchmark and the FRTV Phase I validation process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework to achieve a good consistency with human visual perception. Furthermore, the best configuration is obtained with CIELAB color space associated to KLD deviation measure

Quality criteria benchmark for hyperspectral imagery

Hyperspectral data appear to be of a growing interest over the past few years. However, applications for hyperspectral data are still in their infancy as handling the significant size of the data presents a challenge for the user community. Efficient compression techniques are required, and lossy compression, specifically, will have a role to play, provided its impact on remote sensing applications remains insignificant. To assess the data quality, suitable distortion measures relevant to end-user applications are required. Quality criteria are also of a major interest for the conception and development of new sensors to define their requirements and specifications. This paper proposes a method to evaluate quality criteria in the context of hyperspectral images. The purpose is to provide quality criteria relevant to the impact of degradations on several classification applications. Different quality criteria are considered. Some are traditionnally used in image and video coding and are adapted here to hyperspectral images. Others are specific to hyperspectral data.We also propose the adaptation of two advanced criteria in the presence of different simulated degradations on AVIRIS hyperspectral images. Finally, five criteria are selected to give an accurate representation of the nature and the level of the degradation affecting hyperspectral data

On color image quality assessment using natural image statistics

Color distortion can introduce a significant damage in visual quality perception, however, most of existing reduced-reference quality measures are designed for grayscale images. In this paper, we consider a basic extension of well-known image-statistics based quality assessment measures to color images. In order to evaluate the impact of color information on the measures efficiency, two color spaces are investigated: RGB and CIELAB. Results of an extensive evaluation using TID 2013 benchmark demonstrates that significant improvement can be achieved for a great number of distortion type when the CIELAB color representation is used