Rich Structural Index for Stereoscopic Image Quality Assessment

Abstract

The human visual system (HVS), affected by viewing distance when perceiving the stereo image information, is of great significance to study of stereoscopic image quality assessment. Many methods of stereoscopic image quality assessment do not have comprehensive consideration for human visual perception characteristics. In accordance with this, we propose a Rich Structural Index (RSI) for Stereoscopic Image objective Quality Assessment (SIQA) method based on multi-scale perception characteristics. To begin with, we put the stereo pair into the image pyramid based on Contrast Sensitivity Function (CSF) to obtain sensitive images of different resolution. Then, we obtain local Luminance and Structural Index (LSI) in a locally adaptive manner on gradient maps which consider the luminance masking and contrast masking. At the same time we use Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to obtain the Sharpness and Intrinsic Structural Index (SISI) to effectively capture the changes introduced in the image (due to distortion). Meanwhile, considering the disparity edge structures, we use gradient cross-mapping algorithm to obtain Depth Texture Structural Index (DTSI). After that, we apply the standard deviation method for the above results to obtain contrast index of reference and distortion components. Finally, for the loss caused by the randomness of the parameters, we use Support Vector Machine Regression based on Genetic Algorithm (GA-SVR) training to obtain the final quality score. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation with state-of-the-art methods on four open databases. The experimental results show that the proposed method has stable performance and strong competitive advantage.