Blind image quality assessment utilising local mean eigenvalues

Abstract

Eigenvalues are intrinsic and representative values of a square matrix. They have thus been used in many image processing areas due to their important application value, but not in the image quality assessment (IQA) field. In this Letter, the authors study the correlation between local mean eigenvalues (LMEs) and perceptual quality of images, and demonstrate the applicability of LMEs in IQA. The LMEs are related to structural complexity of images. The LMEs and natural scene statistics features are utilised for a sparse dictionary learning. Experimental results conducted on promising IQA databases show their method's superiority in comparison with top-performing blind IQA metrics.