Blind image quality assessment using Beltrami filter-based contrast features (BF-bCF) & LSTM network

Abstract

ABSTRACT Advanced networks excel in Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA), however accurate estimation of quality scores remains challenging due to unrevealed features extricated under various distortions. This article presents a Beltrami filter-based Contrast feature and long short-term memory (BF-bCF & LSTM) framework for feature extraction, suitable for both authentic and synthetic image distortions. The framework comprises four modules: an edge preservation and enhancement module, a distortion-conscious module, a weight module, and a quality-predicting network. The edge enhancement module assists the distortion-conscious module by enhancing the overall quality of the input grayscale image. The distortion-conscious module uses a modified Difference of Gaussian (DoG) measure to mitigate the distortion and assign patch weights in the filtered image. The proposed BIQA framework assimilating LSTM effectively extricates significant components using principal component analysis (PCA) and predicts nearer scores. Experiments on synthetic and authentic datasets showed superior performance relating to SROCC and PLCC above 0.9.