Blind Quality Assessment of Stereoscopic Images Considering Binocular Perception Based on Shearlet Decomposition

Abstract

Due to the deficient knowledge of binocular vision properties, how to effectively evaluate stereoscopic images still remains a challenging task. Inspired by multichannel processing of human visual system (HVS), we propose a blind method for stereoscopic image quality assessment (SIQA) by extracting quality related features in sub-bands of the image. First of all, we introduce the shearlet transform to decompose the left- and right-view images into multiple sub-bands content with diverse combinations of scales and orientations, and obtain the combined view based on energy-weighted summation of the corresponding sub-bands of two eye views. Then, natural scene statistics (NSS) of the original left and right images are obtained as quality-sensitive features, followed by extracting NSS features of the sub-bands of left, right and combined views. Moreover, we calculate the gradient similarity between each sub-band pair to denote the asymmetric distortion and disparity information. Finally, all the extracted features are mapped into a quality score by support vector regression (SVR). experimental results on multiple benchmark databases verify the superiority of our method.

Keywords

• Blind quality assessment
• human visual system
• natural scene statistics
• shearlet transform
• stereoscopic image