Perceived assessment metrics for visible and infrared color fused image quality without reference image

• Published in: Optical review (Tokyo, Japan) Vol. 22; no. 1; pp. 109 - 122
• Main Authors: Yu, Xuelian, Chen, Qian, Gu, Guohua, Ren, Jianle, Sui, Xiubao
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Tokyo Springer Japan 01.02.2015
• Subjects: Atomic; Lasers; Microwaves; Molecular; Optical and Plasma Physics; Optical Devices; Optics; Photonics; Physics; Physics and Astronomy; Quantum Optics; Regular Paper; RF and Optical Engineering; Perceptual image quality; Objective evaluation; Human vision system; Color fusion image; Contrast sensitivity function
• DOI: 10.1007/s10043-015-0058-9
• ISSN: 1340-6000

Designing objective quality assessment of color-fused image is a very demanding and challenging task. We propose four no-reference metrics based on human visual system characteristics for objectively evaluating the quality of false color fusion image. The perceived edge metric (PEM) is defined based on visual perception model and color image gradient similarity between the fused image and the source images. The perceptual contrast metric (PCM) is established associating multi-scale contrast and varying contrast sensitivity filter (CSF) with color components. The linear combination of the standard deviation and mean value over the fused image construct the image colorfulness metric (ICM). The color comfort metric (CCM) is designed by the average saturation and the ratio of pixels with high and low saturation. The qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that the proposed metrics have a good agreement with subjective perception.