Curvature and Entropy Statistics-Based Blind Multi-Exposure Fusion Image Quality Assessment

Abstract

The multi-exposure fusion (MEF) technique provides humans a new opportunity for natural scene representation, and the related quality assessment issues are urgent to be considered for validating the effectiveness of these techniques. In this paper, a curvature and entropy statistics-based blind MEF image quality assessment (CE-BMIQA) method is proposed to perceive the quality degradation objectively. The transformation process from multiple images with different exposure levels to the final MEF image leads to the loss of structure and detail information, so that the related curvature statistics features and entropy statistics features are utilized to portray the above distortion presentation. The former features are extracted from the histogram statistics of surface type map calculated by mean curvature and Gaussian curvature of MEF image. Moreover, contrast energy weighting is attached to consider the contrast variation of the MEF image. The latter features refer to spatial entropy and spectral entropy. All extracted features based on a multi-scale scheme are aggregated by training the quality regression model via random forest. Since the MEF image and its feature representation are spatially symmetric in physics, the final prediction quality is symmetric to and representative of the image distortion. Experimental results on a public MEF image database demonstrate that the proposed CE-BMIQA method achieves more outstanding performance than the state-of-the-art blind image quality assessment ones.

Keywords

• multi-exposure fusion image
• blind quality assessment
• curvature
• entropy statistics
• contrast energy weighting