HOMOGENEITY BASED BLIND NOISY IMAGE QUALITY ASSESSMENT

Blind noisy image quality assessment aims to evaluate the quality of the degraded noisy image without the need for the ground truth image. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes an image quality assessment approach using block homogeneity. The contribution of the proposed approach is two-fold. First, a block-based homogeneity measure is proposed to estimate the statistics (e.g., variance) of the noise incurred in the image, based on adaptively selected homogeneous image regions. Second, an image quality assessment approach is proposed by exploiting the above-mentioned estimated noise variance, along with the visual masking effect of the human visual system. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed image noise estimation approach yields superior accuracy and stability performance to that of conventional approaches, and the proposed image quality assessment approach achieves consistent performance to that of human subjective evaluation.