An Efficient Approach of Assessing Quality of Blurred Image

Abstract

This paper presents a method for evaluating the quality of images altered by Gaussian blur. The method is based on the observation of bokeh mode images where the region of interest (foreground) is sharp, while the remaining parts (background) are intentionally blurred to enhance the perceptual quality of the image. The blurriness of the background increases attention towards the foreground part of the image. The proposed quality metric is obtained by combining the attention factor and the sharpness of the region of interest. The accuracy, in terms of Spearman’s-rank-order correlation-coefficient (SROCC), for popular and publicly available databases such as LIVE, VCL, TID2008, CSIQ, and TID2013, is 0.963, 0.925, 0.900, 0.930, and 0.930, respectively. The proposed method achieves high and consistent Spearman’s rank-order correlation coefficient (SROCC) values compared to the majority of state-of-the-art algorithms. Furthermore, in terms of speed, the proposed method surpasses other state-of-the-art methods. The MATLAB code of the proposed metric is publicly available at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SRmUp0N157Ati9l3kV13uoCxw5PhMgQn?usp=sharing .