A no-reference image quality assessment metric for wood images

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is a vital element in improving the efficiency of an automatic recognition system of various wood species. There is a need to develop a No-Reference IQA (NR-IQA) system as a perfect and distortion free wood images may be impossible to be acquired in the dusty environment in timber factories. To the best of our knowledge, there is no NR-IQA developed for wood images specifically. Therefore, a Gray Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Gabor features-based NR-IQA (GGNR-IQA) metric is proposed to assess the quality of wood images. The proposed metric is developed by training the support vector machine regression with GLCM and Gabor features calculated for wood images together with scores obtained from subjective evaluation. The proposed IQA metric is compared with a widely used NR-IQA metric, Blind/Referenceless Image Spatial Quality Evaluator (BRISQUE) and Full Reference-IQA (FR-IQA) metrics. Results shows that the proposed NR-IQA metric outperforms the BRISQUE and the FR-IQA metrics. Moreover, the proposed NR-IQA metric is beneficial in wood industry as a distortion free reference image is not needed to evaluate the wood image

Gray Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Gabor Features Based No-Reference Image Quality Assessment for Wood Images

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is an imperative element in improving the effectiveness of an automatic wood recognition system. There is a need to develop a No-Reference-IQA (NR-IQA) system as a distortion free wood images are impossible to be acquired in the dusty environment in timber factories. Therefore, a Gray Level Co- Occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Gabor features-based NR-IQA, GGNR-IQA algorithm is proposed to evaluate the quality of wood images. The proposed GGNR-IQA algorithm is compared with a well-known NR-IQA, Blind/Referenceless Image Spatial Quality Evaluator (BRISQUE) and Full-Reference-IQA (FR-IQA) algorithms, Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Multiscale SSIM (MS-SSIM), Feature SIMilarity (FSIM), Information Weighted SSIM (IW-SSIM) and Gradient Magnitude Similarity Deviation (GMSD). Results shows that the GGNR-IQA algorithm outperforms the NR-IQA and FR-IQAs. The GGNR-IQA algorithm is beneficial in wood industry as a distortion free reference image is not required to pre-process wood images

Application of image quality assessment module to motion-blurred wood images for wood species identification system

Despite tighter conservation regulations, demand for timber products has continued to increase due to growing population. Normally, experts identify the wood species based on the pattern of the wood surface texture. However, manual inspection on wood texture is tedious, time-consuming, impractical and cost-ineffective for a human to analyze a large number of timber species. Therefore, a reliable automatic wood recognition system is needed in order to classify the wood species efficiently. The proposed system includes image acquisition, image quality assessment module (IQA), image deblurring, feature extraction and classification. In this research, the wood images are motion-blurred due to imperfections in the imaging and capturing process. Hence, an IQA module is proposed to monitor the quality of images before proceeding to the next stage which is the feature extraction process. The IQA module will determine whether the image has to undergo the image deblurring process based on the image quality value. If the image is of low quality based on the image quality value obtained, then the image will be deblurred before the feature extraction procedure. A reliable motion deblurring technique, which is based on Lucy–Richardson algorithm, is employed to enhance the motion-blurred images before proceeding to the next stage, which is the feature extraction process. Then, a statistical feature extraction technique is proposed to extract 24 features from each wood image. Finally, a support vector machine is used to classify the 20 tropical wood species. © 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature

No-reference quality assessment for image-based assessment of economically important tropical woods.

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is essential for the accuracy of systems for automatic recognition of tree species for wood samples. In this study, a No-Reference IQA (NR-IQA), wood NR-IQA (WNR-IQA) metric was proposed to assess the quality of wood images. Support Vector Regression (SVR) was trained using Generalized Gaussian Distribution (GGD) and Asymmetric Generalized Gaussian Distribution (AGGD) features, which were measured for wood images. Meanwhile, the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) was obtained from the subjective evaluation. This was followed by a comparison between the proposed IQA metric, WNR-IQA, and three established NR-IQA metrics, namely Blind/Referenceless Image Spatial Quality Evaluator (BRISQUE), deepIQA, Deep Bilinear Convolutional Neural Networks (DB-CNN), and five Full Reference-IQA (FR-IQA) metrics known as MSSIM, SSIM, FSIM, IWSSIM, and GMSD. The proposed WNR-IQA metric, BRISQUE, deepIQA, DB-CNN, and FR-IQAs were then compared with MOS values to evaluate the performance of the automatic IQA metrics. As a result, the WNR-IQA metric exhibited a higher performance compared to BRISQUE, deepIQA, DB-CNN, and FR-IQA metrics. Highest quality images may not be routinely available due to logistic factors, such as dust, poor illumination, and hot environment present in the timber industry. Moreover, motion blur could occur due to the relative motion between the camera and the wood slice. Therefore, the advantage of WNR-IQA could be seen from its independency from a "perfect" reference image for the image quality evaluation