Blind omnidirectional image quality assessment with representative features and viewport oriented statistical features

Abstract

With the development of information technologies, various types of streaming images are generated, such as videos, graphics, Virtual Reality (VR)/omnidirectional images (OIs), etc. Among them, the OIs usually have a broader view and a higher resolution, which provides human an immersive visual experience in a head-mounted display. However, the current image quality assessment works cannot achieve good performance without considering representative human visual features and visual viewing characteristics of OIs, which limited OIs’ further development. Motivated by the above problem, this work proposes a blind omnidirectional image quality assessment (BOIQA) model based on representative features and viewport oriented statistical features. Specifically, we apply the local binary pattern operator to encoder the cross-channel color information, and apply the weighted LBP to extract the structural features. Then the local natural scene statistics (NSS) features are extracted by using the viewport sampling to boost the performance. Finally, we apply support vector regression to predict the OIs’ quality score, and experimental results on CVIQD2018 and OIQA2018 Databases prove that the proposed model achieves better performance than state-of-the-art OIQA models.