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

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

CSF curve.

<p>CSF curve.</p

Quality Index for Stereoscopic Images by Separately Evaluating Adding and Subtracting

<p>Summation and difference of stereo pair (a) Left view, (b) Right view, (c) binocular difference map and (d) binocular summation map.</p

Performance comparison of each part and overall.

<p>Performance comparison of each part and overall.</p

Subbands indexing of DWT.

<p>Each subband is indexed by a level λ and an orientation <i>θ</i>. <i>θ</i> = 2, 3, 4 denote the vertical, horizontal, and diagonal subbands, respectively.</p

Weighting matrix <i>w</i> used in contrast masking.

<p>Weighting matrix <i>w</i> used in contrast masking.</p

10 statistic results of 18 distorted pairs of an original pair.

<p>10 statistic results of 18 distorted pairs of an original pair.</p

Structure of the proposed metric.

<p>Structure of the proposed metric.</p

Decoupling Result of Test Binocular Summation.

<p>Decoupling Result of Test Binocular Summation.</p