Retina model inspired image quality assessment

Abstract

We proposed in this paper a retina model based approach for image quality assessment. The retinal model is consisted of an optical modulation transfer module and an adaptive low-pass filtering module. We treat the model as a black box and design the adaptive filter using an information theoretical approach. Since the information rate of visual signals is far beyond the processing power of the human visual system, there must be an effective data reduction stage in human visual brain. Therefore, the underlying assumption for the retina model is that the retina reduces the data amount of the visual scene while retaining as much useful information as possible. For full reference image quality assessment, the original and distorted images pass through the retinal filter before some kind of distance is calculated between the images. Retina filtering can serve as a general preprocessing stage for most existing image quality metrics. We show in this paper that retina model based MSE/PSNR, though being straightforward, has already state of the art performance on several image quality databases.