A Multi-Scale Learning Local Phase and Amplitude Blind Image Quality Assessment for Multiply Distorted Images

Abstract

In the real application, digital images may undergo the process of acquisition, compression, and transmission, which causes the excess blurring, quantization, and noise. However, the metrics of image quality assessment for multiply distorted images are very limited. In this paper, we propose a new multiscale learning quality-aware features blind image quality assessment algorithm for multiply distorted images by using both local phase and local amplitude. In the new model, a distorted image is decomposed into three scales by Gabor transform, and its phase congruency image (PCI), phase congruency covariance maximum image (PCCmax), and phase congruency covariance minimum image (PCCmin) are produced. Then, we calculate contrast sensitivity function and gray level-gradient co-occurrence matrix features from distorted image and its PCI, PCCmax, and PCCmin, and mean value of intensity of PCI, PCCmax, PCCmin, and overlapping blocked local amplitude of distorted image. At last, SVR is used to build the approximating function between these features and subjective mean opinion scores. Both local phase and local amplitude features are extracted at multi-scale images, which supply more flexibility than the previous single-scale methods in incorporating the variations of viewing scene. Comparative experiments between our proposed metric and the state-of-the-art full-reference and no-reference metrics are conducted on two newly released multiply distorted image databases (LIVEMD and MDID2013) that demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Keywords

• Blind image quality assessment
• multiply distorted images
• multi-scale images
• phase congruency
• local amplitude
• support vector regression