Center Emphasized Visual Saliency and Contrast-based Full Reference Image Quality Index

Objective Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is imperative in this multimedia-intensive world to asses the visual quality of an image close to the human ability. There are many parameters that bring human attention to an image and if the center part contains any visually salient information then it draws the attention even more. To the best of our knowledge, any previous IQA method did not give extra importance to the center part. In this paper, we propose a full reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) approach using visual saliency and contrast, however, we give extra attention to the center by raising-up sensitivity of the similarity maps in that region. We evaluated our method on three popular benchmark databases (TID2008, CSIQ and LIVE) and compared with 13 state-of-the-art approaches which reveal the stronger correlation of our method with human evaluated values. The prediction of quality score is consistent for distortion-specific as well as distortion-independent cases. Moreover, faster processing makes it applicable to any real-time application. The MATLAB pcode is publicly available online to test the algorithm and can be found at http://layek.khu.ac.kr/CEQI.