scholarly journals A Combined Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment Method Based on Convolutional Activation Maps

Algorithms ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 313
Author(s):  
Domonkos Varga
Keyword(s):  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Feature Vector ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Prediction Performance ◽  
Perceptual Quality ◽  
Reference Image ◽  
Full Reference

The goal of full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) is to predict the perceptual quality of an image as perceived by human observers using its pristine (distortion free) reference counterpart. In this study, we explore a novel, combined approach which predicts the perceptual quality of a distorted image by compiling a feature vector from convolutional activation maps. More specifically, a reference-distorted image pair is run through a pretrained convolutional neural network and the activation maps are compared with a traditional image similarity metric. Subsequently, the resulting feature vector is mapped onto perceptual quality scores with the help of a trained support vector regressor. A detailed parameter study is also presented in which the design choices of the proposed method is explained. Furthermore, we study the relationship between the amount of training images and the prediction performance. Specifically, it is demonstrated that the proposed method can be trained with a small amount of data to reach high prediction performance. Our best proposal—called ActMapFeat—is compared to the state-of-the-art on six publicly available benchmark IQA databases, such as KADID-10k, TID2013, TID2008, MDID, CSIQ, and VCL-FER. Specifically, our method is able to significantly outperform the state-of-the-art on these benchmark databases.

scholarly journals DLNR-SIQA: Deep Learning-Based No-Reference Stitched Image Quality Assessment

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (22) ◽  
pp. 6457
Author(s):  
Hayat Ullah ◽  
Muhammad Irfan ◽  
Kyungjin Han ◽  
Jong Weon Lee
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Reference Image ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Panoramic Images ◽  
Stitching Errors

Due to recent advancements in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), the demand for high quality immersive contents is a primary concern for production companies and consumers. Similarly, the topical record-breaking performance of deep learning in various domains of artificial intelligence has extended the attention of researchers to contribute to different fields of computer vision. To ensure the quality of immersive media contents using these advanced deep learning technologies, several learning based Stitched Image Quality Assessment methods have been proposed with reasonable performances. However, these methods are unable to localize, segment, and extract the stitching errors in panoramic images. Further, these methods used computationally complex procedures for quality assessment of panoramic images. With these motivations, in this paper, we propose a novel three-fold Deep Learning based No-Reference Stitched Image Quality Assessment (DLNR-SIQA) approach to evaluate the quality of immersive contents. In the first fold, we fined-tuned the state-of-the-art Mask R-CNN (Regional Convolutional Neural Network) on manually annotated various stitching error-based cropped images from the two publicly available datasets. In the second fold, we segment and localize various stitching errors present in the immersive contents. Finally, based on the distorted regions present in the immersive contents, we measured the overall quality of the stitched images. Unlike existing methods that only measure the quality of the images using deep features, our proposed method can efficiently segment and localize stitching errors and estimate the image quality by investigating segmented regions. We also carried out extensive qualitative and quantitative comparison with full reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) and no reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) on two publicly available datasets, where the proposed system outperformed the existing state-of-the-art techniques.

scholarly journals No-Reference Image Quality Assessment with Multi-Scale Orderless Pooling of Deep Features

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (7) ◽  
pp. 112
Author(s):  
Domonkos Varga
Keyword(s):  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Multiple Scales ◽  
Digital Images ◽  
Input Image ◽  
Perceptual Quality ◽  
Reference Image ◽  
Benchmark Datasets ◽  
In The Wild

The goal of no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is to evaluate their perceptual quality of digital images without using the distortion-free, pristine counterparts. NR-IQA is an important part of multimedia signal processing since digital images can undergo a wide variety of distortions during storage, compression, and transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture that extracts deep features from the input image at multiple scales to improve the effectiveness of feature extraction for NR-IQA using convolutional neural networks. Specifically, the proposed method extracts deep activations for local patches at multiple scales and maps them onto perceptual quality scores with the help of trained Gaussian process regressors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the introduced algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods on three large benchmark datasets with authentic distortions (LIVE In the Wild, KonIQ-10k, and SPAQ).

Perceptual Quality Assessment of Low-light Image Enhancement

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Guangtao Zhai ◽  
Wei Sun ◽  
Xiongkuo Min ◽  
Jiantao Zhou
Keyword(s):  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Enhancement ◽  
Dynamic Range ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Perceptual Quality ◽  
Low Light ◽  
Light Image ◽  
Light Enhancement

Low-light image enhancement algorithms (LIEA) can light up images captured in dark or back-lighting conditions. However, LIEA may introduce various distortions such as structure damage, color shift, and noise into the enhanced images. Despite various LIEAs proposed in the literature, few efforts have been made to study the quality evaluation of low-light enhancement. In this article, we make one of the first attempts to investigate the quality assessment problem of low-light image enhancement. To facilitate the study of objective image quality assessment (IQA), we first build a large-scale low-light image enhancement quality (LIEQ) database. The LIEQ database includes 1,000 light-enhanced images, which are generated from 100 low-light images using 10 LIEAs. Rather than evaluating the quality of light-enhanced images directly, which is more difficult, we propose to use the multi-exposure fused (MEF) image and stack-based high dynamic range (HDR) image as a reference and evaluate the quality of low-light enhancement following a full-reference (FR) quality assessment routine. We observe that distortions introduced in low-light enhancement are significantly different from distortions considered in traditional image IQA databases that are well-studied, and the current state-of-the-art FR IQA models are also not suitable for evaluating their quality. Therefore, we propose a new FR low-light image enhancement quality assessment (LIEQA) index by evaluating the image quality from four aspects: luminance enhancement, color rendition, noise evaluation, and structure preserving, which have captured the most key aspects of low-light enhancement. Experimental results on the LIEQ database show that the proposed LIEQA index outperforms the state-of-the-art FR IQA models. LIEQA can act as an evaluator for various low-light enhancement algorithms and systems. To the best of our knowledge, this article is the first of its kind comprehensive low-light image enhancement quality assessment study.

Precise No-Reference Image Quality Evaluation Based on Distortion Identification

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3s) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Chenggang Yan ◽  
Tong Teng ◽  
Yutao Liu ◽  
Yongbing Zhang ◽  
Haoqian Wang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Quality Evaluation ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Gaussian White Noise ◽  
The State ◽  
Reference Image

The difficulty of no-reference image quality assessment (NR IQA) often lies in the lack of knowledge about the distortion in the image, which makes quality assessment blind and thus inefficient. To tackle such issue, in this article, we propose a novel scheme for precise NR IQA, which includes two successive steps, i.e., distortion identification and targeted quality evaluation. In the first step, we employ the well-known Inception-ResNet-v2 neural network to train a classifier that classifies the possible distortion in the image into the four most common distortion types, i.e., Gaussian white noise (WN), Gaussian blur (GB), jpeg compression (JPEG), and jpeg2000 compression (JP2K). Specifically, the deep neural network is trained on the large-scale Waterloo Exploration database, which ensures the robustness and high performance of distortion classification. In the second step, after determining the distortion type of the image, we then design a specific approach to quantify the image distortion level, which can estimate the image quality specially and more precisely. Extensive experiments performed on LIVE, TID2013, CSIQ, and Waterloo Exploration databases demonstrate that (1) the accuracy of our distortion classification is higher than that of the state-of-the-art distortion classification methods, and (2) the proposed NR IQA method outperforms the state-of-the-art NR IQA methods in quantifying the image quality.

scholarly journals Interobserver variability in quality assessment of magnetic resonance images

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafal Obuchowicz ◽  
Mariusz Oszust ◽  
Adam Piorkowski
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Interobserver Variability ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Magnetic Resonance Images ◽  
Perceptual Quality ◽  
Mr Images

Abstract Background The perceptual quality of magnetic resonance (MR) images influences diagnosis and may compromise the treatment. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how the image quality changes influence the interobserver variability of their assessment. Methods For the variability evaluation, a dataset containing distorted MRI images was prepared and then assessed by 31 experienced medical professionals (radiologists). Differences between observers were analyzed using the Fleiss’ kappa. However, since the kappa evaluates the agreement among radiologists taking into account aggregated decisions, a typically employed criterion of the image quality assessment (IQA) performance was used to provide a more thorough analysis. The IQA performance of radiologists was evaluated by comparing the Spearman correlation coefficients, ρ, between individual scores with the mean opinion scores (MOS) composed of the subjective opinions of the remaining professionals. Results The experiments show that there is a significant agreement among radiologists (κ=0.12; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.118, 0.121; P<0.001) on the quality of the assessed images. The resulted κ is strongly affected by the subjectivity of the assigned scores, separately presenting close scores. Therefore, the ρ was used to identify poor performance cases and to confirm the consistency of the majority of collected scores (ρmean = 0.5706). The results for interns (ρmean = 0.6868) supports the finding that the quality assessment of MR images can be successfully taught. Conclusions The agreement observed among radiologists from different imaging centers confirms the subjectivity of the perception of MR images. It was shown that the image content and severity of distortions affect the IQA. Furthermore, the study highlights the importance of the psychosomatic condition of the observers and their attitude.

scholarly journals Quaternion wavelet transform based full reference image quality assessment for multiply distorted images

PLoS ONE ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. e0199430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chaofeng Li ◽  
Yifan Li ◽  
Yunhao Yuan ◽  
Xiaojun Wu ◽  
Qingbing Sang
Keyword(s):  
Wavelet Transform ◽  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Reference Image ◽  
Full Reference ◽  
Quaternion Wavelet Transform
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