Toward a No-Reference Quality Metric for Camera-Captured Images

Existing no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) metrics are still not convincing for evaluating the quality of the camera-captured images. Toward tackling this issue, we, in this article, establish a novel NR quality metric for quantifying the quality of the camera-captured images reliably. Since the image quality is hierarchically perceived from the low-level preliminary visual perception to the high-level semantic comprehension in the human brain, in our proposed metric, we characterize the image quality by exploiting both the low-level image properties and the high-level semantics of the image. Specifically, we extract a series of low-level features to characterize the fundamental image properties, including the brightness, saturation, contrast, noiseness, sharpness, and naturalness, which are highly indicative of the camera-captured image quality. Correspondingly, the high-level features are designed to characterize the semantics of the image. The low-level and high-level perceptual features play complementary roles in measuring the image quality. To infer the image quality, we employ the support vector regression (SVR) to map all the informative features to a single quality score. Thorough tests conducted on two standard camera-captured image databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed quality metric in assessing the image quality and its superiority over the state-of-the-art NR quality metrics. The source code of the proposed metric for camera-captured images is released at https://github.com/YT2015?tab=repositories.