Semi-reference image quality metric for virtual view images in free-viewpoint television

• Published in: High technology letters Vol. 15; no. 4; pp. 394 - 400
• Main Author: 杨铀 Jiang Gangyi Yu Mei Shao Feng Zhang Yun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Faulty of Information Science and Engineering,Ningbo University,Ningbo 315211 01.12.2009; Department of Automation,Tsinghua University,%Institute of Computing Technology,Chinese Academy of Sciences,Beijing 100190; Institute of Computing Technology,Chinese Academy of Sciences,Beijing 100190; Faulty of Information Science and Engineering,Ningbo University,Ningbo 315211%Faulty of Information Science and Engineering,Ningbo University,Ningbo 315211
• Subjects: 图像特征提取; 图像质量评价; 电视图像; 虚拟视图; 质量评价指标; semi-reference image quality metric; image quality assessment; virtual view image (VVI); free-viewpoint television (FTV)
• ISSN: 1006-6748
• DOI: 10.3772/j.issn.1006-6748.2009.04.010

A semi-reference image quality assessment metric based on similarity measurement for synthesized virtual viewpoint image （VVI） in free-viewpoint television system （FFV） is proposed in this paper. The key point of the proposed metric is taking resemblant information between VVI and its neighbor view images for quality assessment to make our metric to be extended to multi-semi-reference image quality assessment easily. The proposed metric first extracts impact factors from image features, then combines an image synthesis technique and similarity functions, in which, disparity information are taken into account for registering the resemblant regions. Experiments are divided into three phases. Phase I is to verify the validation of the proposed metric by taking impaired images and original reference into account. The experimental results show the agreement between evaluation scores and bio-characteristic of human visual system. Phase II shows the accordance with Phase I by taking neighbor view as reference. The proposed metric can be taken as a full reference one to evaluate the image quality even though the original reference is absent. Phase III is then performed to evaluate the quality of WI. Evaluation scores in the experimental results are able to evaluate the quality of VVI.