Visual saliency based structural contrast quality index

Abstract

Studies on human visual systems (HVS) recommend that assessing the structural information change can provide a good approximation of the perceived image quality. Moreover, psychovisual studies have suggested that the HVS is more sensitive to the extraction of visual information in the salient regions rather than minor regions. Based on the above observations, this Letter proposes a novel full‐reference image quality assessment metric called the visual saliency based structural contrast‐quality index by the modification and adjustment of an image signature to incorporate into the structural contrast index (SCI) features, which can well depict the visual quality by considering the local and global visual quality perceptions for different types of structural distortions on the salient regions. The proposed method was tested on four world recognised databases and from the experimental result, it became apparent that the authors proposed method strongly correlates the subjective mean opinion scores and performs better than the existing state‐of‐the‐art image quality assessment methods.