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http://dx.doi.org/10.5909/JBE.2016.21.2.157

A Novel Fast and High-Performance Image Quality Assessment Metric using a Simple Laplace Operator  

Bae, Sung-Ho (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, School of Electrical Engineering)
Kim, Munchurl (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, School of Electrical Engineering)
Publication Information
Journal of Broadcast Engineering / v.21, no.2, 2016 , pp. 157-168 More about this Journal
Abstract
In image processing and computer vision fields, mean squared error (MSE) has popularly been used as an objective metric in image quality optimization problems due to its desirable mathematical properties such as metricability, differentiability and convexity. However, as known that MSE is not highly correlated with perceived visual quality, much effort has been made to develop new image quality assessment (IQA) metrics having both the desirable mathematical properties aforementioned and high prediction performances for subjective visual quality scores. Although recent IQA metrics having the desirable mathematical properties have shown to give some promising results in prediction performance for visual quality scores, they also have high computation complexities. In order to alleviate this problem, we propose a new fast IQA metric using a simple Laplace operator. Since the Laplace operator used in our IQA metric can not only effectively mimic operations of receptive fields in retina for luminance stimulus but also be simply computed, our IQA metric can yield both very fast processing speed and high prediction performance. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed IQA metric, our method is compared to some state-of-the-art IQA metrics. The experimental results showed that the proposed IQA metric has the fastest running speed compared the IQA methods except MSE under comparison. Moreover, our IQA metric achieves the best prediction performance for subjective image quality scores among the state-of-the-art IQA metrics under test.
Keywords
Human visual system; Simple Laplace operator; image quality assessment; computation complexity; mean squared error;
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