An Improved SPSIM Index for Image Quality Assessment

Abstract

Objective image quality assessment (IQA) measures are playing an increasingly important role in the evaluation of digital image quality. New IQA indices are expected to be strongly correlated with subjective observer evaluations expressed by Mean Opinion Score (MOS) or Difference Mean Opinion Score (DMOS). One such recently proposed index is the SuperPixel-based SIMilarity (SPSIM) index, which uses superpixel patches instead of a rectangular pixel grid. The authors of this paper have proposed three modifications to the SPSIM index. For this purpose, the color space used by SPSIM was changed and the way SPSIM determines similarity maps was modified using methods derived from an algorithm for computing the Mean Deviation Similarity Index (MDSI). The third modification was a combination of the first two. These three new quality indices were used in the assessment process. The experimental results obtained for many color images from five image databases demonstrated the advantages of the proposed SPSIM modifications.

Keywords

• image quality assessment
• image databases
• superpixels
• color image
• color space
• image quality measures