scholarly journals Hierarchical Feature Extraction Assisted with Visual Saliency for Image Quality Assessment

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruizhe Deng ◽  
Yang Zhao ◽  
Yong Ding

Image quality assessment (IQA) is desired to evaluate the perceptual quality of an image in a manner consistent with subjective rating. Considering the characteristics of hierarchical visual cortex, a novel full reference IQA method is proposed in this paper. Quality-aware features that human visual system is sensitive to are extracted to describe image quality comprehensively. Concretely, log Gabor filters and local tetra patterns are employed to capture spatial frequency and local texture features, which are attractive to the primary and secondary visual cortex, respectively. Moreover, images are enhanced before feature extraction with the assistance of visual saliency maps since visual attention affects human evaluation of image quality. The similarities between the features extracted from distorted image and corresponding reference images are synthesized and mapped into an objective quality score by support vector regression. Experiments conducted on four public IQA databases show that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and robustness; that is, it is highly consistent with subjective evaluation and is robust across different databases.

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (7) ◽  
pp. 112
Author(s):  
Domonkos Varga

The goal of no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is to evaluate their perceptual quality of digital images without using the distortion-free, pristine counterparts. NR-IQA is an important part of multimedia signal processing since digital images can undergo a wide variety of distortions during storage, compression, and transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture that extracts deep features from the input image at multiple scales to improve the effectiveness of feature extraction for NR-IQA using convolutional neural networks. Specifically, the proposed method extracts deep activations for local patches at multiple scales and maps them onto perceptual quality scores with the help of trained Gaussian process regressors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the introduced algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods on three large benchmark datasets with authentic distortions (LIVE In the Wild, KonIQ-10k, and SPAQ).


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafal Obuchowicz ◽  
Mariusz Oszust ◽  
Adam Piorkowski

Abstract Background The perceptual quality of magnetic resonance (MR) images influences diagnosis and may compromise the treatment. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how the image quality changes influence the interobserver variability of their assessment. Methods For the variability evaluation, a dataset containing distorted MRI images was prepared and then assessed by 31 experienced medical professionals (radiologists). Differences between observers were analyzed using the Fleiss’ kappa. However, since the kappa evaluates the agreement among radiologists taking into account aggregated decisions, a typically employed criterion of the image quality assessment (IQA) performance was used to provide a more thorough analysis. The IQA performance of radiologists was evaluated by comparing the Spearman correlation coefficients, ρ, between individual scores with the mean opinion scores (MOS) composed of the subjective opinions of the remaining professionals. Results The experiments show that there is a significant agreement among radiologists (κ=0.12; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.118, 0.121; P<0.001) on the quality of the assessed images. The resulted κ is strongly affected by the subjectivity of the assigned scores, separately presenting close scores. Therefore, the ρ was used to identify poor performance cases and to confirm the consistency of the majority of collected scores (ρmean = 0.5706). The results for interns (ρmean = 0.6868) supports the finding that the quality assessment of MR images can be successfully taught. Conclusions The agreement observed among radiologists from different imaging centers confirms the subjectivity of the perception of MR images. It was shown that the image content and severity of distortions affect the IQA. Furthermore, the study highlights the importance of the psychosomatic condition of the observers and their attitude.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 2499
Author(s):  
Yiling Tang ◽  
Shunliang Jiang ◽  
Shaoping Xu ◽  
Tingyun Liu ◽  
Chongxi Li

To improve the evaluation accuracy of the distorted images with various distortion types, an effective blind image quality assessment (BIQA) algorithm based on the multi-window method and the HSV color space is proposed in this paper. We generate multiple normalized feature maps (NFMs) by using the multi-window method to better characterize image degradation from the receptive fields of different sizes. Specifically, the distribution statistics are first extracted from the multiple NFMs. Then, Pearson linear correlation coefficients between spatially adjacent pixels in the NFMs are utilized to quantify the structural changes of the distorted images. Weibull model is utilized to capture distribution statistics of the differential feature maps between the NFMs to more precisely describe the presence of the distortions. Moreover, the entropy and gradient statistics extracted from the HSV color space are employed as a complement to the gray-scale features. Finally, a support vector regressor is adopted to map the perceptual feature vector to image quality score. Experimental results on five benchmark databases demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves higher prediction accuracy and robustness against diverse synthetically and authentically distorted images than the state-of-the-art algorithms while maintaining low computational cost.


Author(s):  
Yang Wen ◽  
Ying Li ◽  
Xiaohua Zhang ◽  
Wuzhen Shi ◽  
Lin Wang ◽  
...  

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