Free- Reference Image Quality Assessment Framework Using Metrics Fusion and Dimensionality Reduction

This paper focuses on no-reference image quality assessment(NR-IQA)metrics. In the literature, a wide range of algorithms are proposed to automatically estimate the perceived quality of visual data. However, most of them are not able to effectively quantify the various degradations and artifacts that the image may undergo. Thus, merging of diverse metrics operating in different information domains is hoped to yield better performances, which is the main theme of the proposed work. In particular, the metric proposed in this paper is based on three well-known NR-IQA objective metrics that depend on natural scene statistical attributes from three different domains to extract a vector of image features. Then, Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based dominant eigenvectors method is used to select the most relevant image quality attributes. These latter are used as input to Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) to derive the overall quality index. Validation experiments are divided into two groups; in the first group, learning process (training and test phases) is applied on one single image quality database whereas in the second group of simulations, training and test phases are separated on two distinct datasets. Obtained results demonstrate that the proposed metric performs very well in terms of correlation, monotonicity and accuracy in both the two scenarios.