Sparse Representation-Based Image Quality Index With Adaptive Sub-Dictionaries

Distortions cause structural changes in digital images, leading to degraded visual quality. Dictionary-based sparse representation has been widely studied recently due to its ability to extract inherent image structures. Meantime, it can extract image features with slightly higher level semantics. Intuitively, sparse representation can be used for image quality assessment, because visible distortions can cause significant changes to the sparse features. In this paper, a new sparse representation-based image quality assessment model is proposed based on the construction of adaptive sub-dictionaries. An over-complete dictionary trained from natural images is employed to capture the structure changes between the reference and distorted images by sparse feature extraction via adaptive sub-dictionary selection. Based on the observation that image sparse features are invariant to weak degradations and the perceived image quality is generally influenced by diverse issues, three auxiliary quality features are added, including gradient, color, and luminance information. The proposed method is not sensitive to training images, so a universal dictionary can be adopted for quality evaluation. Extensive experiments on five public image quality databases demonstrate that the proposed method produces the state-of-the-art results, and it delivers consistently well performances when tested in different image quality databases.