Toward an automatic subjective image quality assessment system

Abstract

Usually in the field of image quality assessment the terms "automatic" and "subjective" are often incompatible. In fact, when it comes to image quality assessment, we have mostly two kinds of evaluation techniques: subjective evaluation and objective evaluation. Only objective evaluation techniques being automatizable, while subjective evaluation techniques are performed by a series of visual assessment done by expert or non-expert observers. In this paper, we will present a first attempt to an automatic subjective quality assessment system. The system computes some perception correlated color metrics from a learning set of images. During the learning stage a subjective assessment by users is required so that the system matches the subjective opinions with computed metrics on a variety of images. Once the learning process is over, the system operates in an automatic mode using only the learned knowledge and the reference free computed metrics from the images to assess. Results and also future prospects of this work are presented.