No-Reference Image Quality Assessment by Wide-Perceptual-Domain Scorer Ensemble Method

A no-reference (NR) learning-based approach to assess image quality is presented in this paper. The devised features are extracted from wide perceptual domains, including brightness, contrast, color, distortion, and texture. These features are used to train a model (scorer) which can predict scores. The scorer selection algorithms are utilized to help simplify the proposed system. In the final stage, the ensemble method is used to combine the prediction results from selected scorers. Two multiple-scale versions of the proposed approach are also presented along with the single-scale one. They turn out to have better performances than the original single-scale method. Because of having features from five different domains at multiple image scales and using the outputs (scores) from selected score prediction models as features for multi-scale or cross-scale fusion (i.e., ensemble), the proposed NR image quality assessment models are robust with respect to more than 24 image distortion types. They also can be used on the evaluation of images with authentic distortions. The extensive experiments on three well-known and representative databases confirm the performance robustness of our proposed model.