Opinion-Unaware Blind Quality Assessment of Multiply and Singly Distorted Images via Distortion Parameter Estimation

Image quality assessment based on the perceived structural similarity index of an image

Image quality assessment (IQA) has a very important role and wide applications in image acquisition, storage, transmission and processing. In designing IQA models, human visual system (HVS) characteristics introduced play an important role in improving their performances. In this paper, combining image distortion characteristics with HVS characteristics, based on the structure similarity index (SSIM) model, a novel IQA model based on the perceived structure similarity index (PSIM) of image is proposed. In the method, first, a perception model for HVS perceiving real images is proposed, combining the contrast sensitivity, frequency sensitivity, luminance nonlinearity and masking characteristics of HVS; then, in order to simulate HVS perceiving real image, the real images are processed with the proposed perception model, to eliminate their visual redundancy, thus, the perceived images are obtained; finally, based on the idea and modeling method of SSIM, combining with the features of perceived image, a novel IQA model, namely PSIM, is proposed. Further, in order to illustrate the performance of PSIM, 5335 distorted images with 41 distortion types in four image databases (TID2013, CSIQ, LIVE and CID) are used to simulate from three aspects: overall IQA of each database, IQA for each distortion type of images, and IQA for special distortion types of images. Further, according to the comprehensive benefit of precision, generalization performance and complexity, their IQA results are compared with those of 12 existing IQA models. The experimental results show that the accuracy (PLCC) of PSIM is 9.91% higher than that of SSIM in four databases, on average; and its performance is better than that of 12 existing IQA models. Synthesizing experimental results and theoretical analysis, it is showed that the proposed PSIM model is an effective and excellent IQA model.

Degraded Reference Image Quality Assessment

In practical media distribution systems, visual content usually undergoes multiple stages of quality degradation along the delivery chain, but the pristine source content is rarely available at most quality monitoring points along the chain to serve as a reference for quality assessment. As a result, full-reference (FR) and reduced-reference (RR) image quality assessment (IQA) methods are generally infeasible. Although no-reference (NR) methods are readily applicable, their performance is often not reliable. On the other hand, intermediate references of degraded quality are often available, e.g., at the input of video transcoders, but how to make the best use of them in proper ways has not been deeply investigated. Here we make one of the first attempts to establish a new paradigm named degraded-reference IQA (DR IQA). Specifically, by using a two-stage distortion pipeline we lay out the architectures of DR IQA and introduce a 6-bit code to denote the choices of configurations. We construct the first large-scale databases dedicated to DR IQA and have made them publicly available. We make novel observations on distortion behavior in multi-stage distortion pipelines by comprehensively analyzing five multiple distortion combinations. Based on these observations, we develop novel DR IQA models and make extensive comparisons with a series of baseline models derived from top-performing FR and NR models. The results suggest that DR IQA may offer significant performance improvement in multiple distortion environments, thereby establishing DR IQA as a valid IQA paradigm that is worth further exploration.

BM-IQE: An Image Quality Evaluator with Block-Matching for Both Real-Life Scenes and Remote Sensing Scenes

Like natural images, remote sensing scene images; of which the quality represents the imaging performance of the remote sensor, also suffer from the degradation caused by imaging system. However, current methods measuring the imaging performance in engineering applications require for particular image patterns and lack generality. Therefore, a more universal approach is demanded to assess the imaging performance of remote sensor without constraints of land cover. Due to the fact that existing general-purpose blind image quality assessment (BIQA) methods cannot obtain satisfying results on remote sensing scene images; in this work, we propose a BIQA model of improved performance for natural images as well as remote sensing scene images namely BM-IQE. We employ a novel block-matching strategy called Structural Similarity Block-Matching (SSIM-BM) to match and group similar image patches. In this way, the potential local information among different patches can get expressed; thus, the validity of natural scene statistics (NSS) feature modeling is enhanced. At the same time, we introduce several features to better characterize and express remote sensing images. The NSS features are extracted from each group and the feature vectors are then fitted to a multivariate Gaussian (MVG) model. This MVG model is therefore used against a reference MVG model learned from a corpus of high-quality natural images to produce a basic quality estimation of each patch (centroid of each group). The further quality estimation of each patch is obtained by weighting averaging of its similar patches’ basic quality estimations. The overall quality score of the test image is then computed through average pooling of the patch estimations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed BM-IQE method can not only outperforms other BIQA methods on remote sensing scene image datasets but also achieve competitive performance on general-purpose natural image datasets as compared to existing state-of-the-art FR/NR-IQA methods.

Learning No-Reference Quality Assessment of Multiply and Singly Distorted Images with Big Data

Previous research on no-reference (NR) quality assessment of multiply-distorted images focused mainly on three distortion types (white noise, Gaussian blur, and JPEG compression), while in practice images can be contaminated by many other common distortions due to the various stages of processing. Although MUSIQUE (MUltiply-and Singly-distorted Image QUality Estimator) Zhang et al., TIP 2018 is a successful NR algorithm, this approach is still limited to the three distortion types. In this paper, we extend MUSIQUE to MUSIQUE-II to blindly assess the quality of images corrupted by five distortion types (white noise, Gaussian blur, JPEG compression, JPEG2000 compression, and contrast change) and their combinations. The proposed MUSIQUE-II algorithm builds upon the classification and parameter-estimation framework of its predecessor by using more advanced models and a more comprehensive set of distortion-sensitive features. Specifically, MUSIQUE-II relies on a three-layer classification model to identify 19 distortion types. To predict the five distortion parameter values, MUSIQUE-II extracts an additional 14 contrast features and employs a multi-layer probability-weighting rule. Finally, MUSIQUE-II employs a new most-apparent-distortion strategy to adaptively combine five quality scores based on outputs of three classification models. Experimental results tested on three multiply-distorted and six singly-distorted image quality databases show that MUSIQUE-II yields not only a substantial improvement in quality predictive performance as compared with its predecessor, but also highly competitive performance relative to other state-of-the-art FR/NR IQA algorithms.