Analysis of Benford’s Law for No-Reference Quality Assessment of Natural, Screen-Content, and Synthetic Images

Abstract

With the tremendous growth and usage of digital images, no-reference image quality assessment is becoming increasingly important. This paper presents in-depth analysis of Benford’s law inspired first digit distribution feature vectors for no-reference quality assessment of natural, screen-content, and synthetic images in various viewpoints. Benford’s law makes a prediction for the probability distribution of first digits in natural datasets. It has been applied among others for detecting fraudulent income tax returns, detecting scientific fraud, election forensics, and image forensics. In particular, our analysis is based on first digit distributions in multiple domains (wavelet coefficients, DCT coefficients, singular values, etc.) as feature vectors and the extracted features are mapped onto image quality scores. Extensive experiments have been carried out on seven large image quality benchmark databases. It has been demonstrated that first digit distributions are quality-aware features, and it is possible to reach or outperform the state-of-the-art with them.