Free-energy principle inspired visual quality assessment: An overview

Abstract

The free energy principle was proposed several years ago as a unified justification for some brain theories. The process of human perception, cognition, action, and learning can be well explained using the free energy principle. The free energy principle suggests that the human perception and understanding of a given scene can be modeled as an active inference process, and the human brain tries to explain the scene using an internal generative model. The discrepancy between the given image or view and its best internal generative model explainable part is upper bounded by the free energy of the inference process. It was then conjectured that perceptual quality of the input image is closely related to free energy value of the process. Following this framework, dozens of visual quality assessment techniques have been proposed in the last few years and many have achieved state of the art performance. In this paper, we first give an overview of the free energy principle and then review the free energy principle inspired visual quality assessment metrics with a comparison in terms of algorithm design and performance.