A no-reference quality assessment for contrast-distorted image based on improved learning method

• Published in: Multimedia tools and applications 2019-04, Vol.78 (8), p.10057-10076
• Main Authors: Wu, Yaojun, Zhu, Yonghe, Yang, Yang, Zhang, Weiming, Yu, Nenghai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computer Communication Networks; Computer Science; Curve fitting; Data Structures and Information Theory; Distortion; Feature extraction; Image contrast; Image processing; Image quality; Multimedia Information Systems; Quality; Quality assessment; Special Purpose and Application-Based Systems; Subjective assessment; Support vector machines; Teaching methods
• ISSN: 1380-7501; 1573-7721
• DOI: 10.1007/s11042-018-6524-1

No-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA), which aims to predict image quality without accessing to reference images, is a fundamental and challenging problem in the field of image processing. Nevertheless, there are few researches about contrast-distorted images and results of the existing NR-IQA methods which cannot be in accordance with the subjective assessment results further. Therefore, an effective NR-IQA method for contrast-distorted image is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the proposed method extracts five features of all images from the database based on the natural scene statistics (NSS) model. Then the curve fitting method is subsequently represented to calculate values of natural image features. Finally, an improved Support Vector Regression (SVR) learning method based on grid search is proposed to establish the mapping between image feature values and the quality score of a test image. Experiments proved that the proposed method is effective when compared with other related state-of-the-art image quality assessment (IQA) methods based on three standard databases.