A Light Field Image Quality Assessment Model Based on Symmetry and Depth Features

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology Vol. 31; no. 5; pp. 2046 - 2050
• Main Authors: Tian, Yu, Zeng, Huanqiang, Hou, Junhui, Chen, Jing, Zhu, Jianqing, Ma, Kai-Kuang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.05.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; depth feature; Distortion; Distortion measurement; Feature extraction; Geometry; Image quality; image quality assessment; Light field image; Object recognition; Quality assessment; Symmetry; symmetry feature; Vision systems
• ISSN: 1051-8215; 1558-2205
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSVT.2020.2971256

This paper presents a new full-reference image quality assessment (IQA) method for conducting the perceptual quality evaluation of the light field (LF) images, called the symmetry and depth feature-based model (SDFM). Specifically, the radial symmetry transform is first employed on the luminance components of the reference and distorted LF images to extract their symmetry features for capturing the spatial quality of each view of an LF image. Second, the depth feature extraction scheme is designed to explore the geometry information inherited in an LF image for modeling its LF structural consistency across views. The similarity measurements are subsequently conducted on the comparison of their symmetry and depth features separately, which are further combined to achieve the quality score for the distorted LF image. Note that the proposed SDFM that explores the symmetry and depth features is conformable to the human vision system, which identifies the objects by sensing their structures and geometries. Extensive simulation results on the dense light fields dataset have clearly shown that the proposed SDFM outperforms multiple classical and recently developed IQA algorithms on quality evaluation of the LF images.