Image quality assessment based on inter-patch and intra-patch similarity

PLoS One. 2015 Mar 20;10(3):e0116312. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0116312. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a full-reference (FR) image quality assessment (IQA) scheme, which evaluates image fidelity from two aspects: the inter-patch similarity and the intra-patch similarity. The scheme is performed in a patch-wise fashion so that a quality map can be obtained. On one hand, we investigate the disparity between one image patch and its adjacent ones. This disparity is visually described by an inter-patch feature, where the hybrid effect of luminance masking and contrast masking is taken into account. The inter-patch similarity is further measured by modifying the normalized correlation coefficient (NCC). On the other hand, we also attach importance to the impact of image contents within one patch on the IQA problem. For the intra-patch feature, we consider image curvature as an important complement of image gradient. According to local image contents, the intra-patch similarity is measured by adaptively comparing image curvature and gradient. Besides, a nonlinear integration of the inter-patch and intra-patch similarity is presented to obtain an overall score of image quality. The experiments conducted on six publicly available image databases show that our scheme achieves better performance in comparison with several state-of-the-art schemes.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Databases as Topic
  • Humans
  • Image Enhancement*
  • Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted*
  • ROC Curve

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61271393 and 61301183, and by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant 2013M540947 and 2014T70083. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.