Image quality assessment based on wave atoms transform

Abstract

Image quality assessment is still an active field of research. The main objective of the developed image quality metric is to offer an index of quality that is consistent with the human subjective judgment of image quality. Despite the great number of developed metrics, there is still a need for image analysis tools that is able to extract the most perceptual relevant characteristics of an image. The goal of this work is then to propose a more advanced analysis and representation tools to extract more effective features that could be incorporated in the design of the image quality metric. In this paper, we propose a novel objective metric based on wave atoms transform. This new transform is half multiscale and half multi-directional. It offers a better representation of images containing oscillatory patterns and textures than the others known transforms. In this work, we propose a new full reference image quality metric based on wave atom transform and exploiting some properties of the human visual system. The consistency of the proposed metric with subjective evaluation is performed on LIVE database. The obtained correlation of this metric with the MOS provided by the database is better than other known metrics confirming thus the efficiency of this new image quality measure in predicting image quality.