Image decomposition-based structural similarity index for image quality assessment

Perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) adopts a computational model to assess the image quality in a fashion, which is consistent with human visual system (HVS). From the view of HVS, different image regions have different importance. Based on this fact, we propose a simple and effective method based on the image decomposition for image quality assessment. In our method, we first divide an image into two components: edge component and texture component. To separate edge and texture components, we use the TV flow-based nonlinear diffusion method rather than the classic TV regularization methods, for highly effective computing. Different from the existing content-based IQA methods, we realize different methods on different components to compute image quality. More specifically, the luminance and contrast similarity are computed in texture component, while the structural similarity is computed in edge component. After obtaining the local quality map, we use texture component again as a weight function to derive a single quality score. Experimental results on five datasets show that, compared with previous approaches in the literatures, the proposed method is more efficient and delivers higher prediction accuracy.