Full-reference image quality assessment by combining features in spatial and frequency domains

Abstract

Objective image quality assessment employs mathematical and computational theory to objectively assess the quality of output images based on the human visual system (HVS). In this paper, a novel approach based on multifeature extraction in the spatial and frequency domains is proposed. We combine the gradient magnitude and phase congruency maps to generate a local structure (LS) map, which can perceive local structural distortions. The LS matches well with HVS and highlights differences with details. For complex visual information, such as texture and contrast sensitivity, we deploy the log-Gabor filter, and spatial frequency, respectively, to effectively capture their variations. Moreover, we employ the random forest (RF) to overcome the limitations of existing pooling methods. Compared with support vector regression, RF can obtain better prediction results. Extensive experimental results on the five benchmark databases indicate that the proposed method precedes all the state-of-the-art image quality assessment metrics in terms of prediction accuracy. In addition, the proposed method is in compliance with the subjective evaluations.