NR-IQA for noise-affected images using singular value decomposition

Abstract

This study presents an efficient no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) technique to assess the quality of images affected by noise. The proposed technique is based on two characteristics of the human eye (retina), namely the presence of centre-surround receptive field and visualisation utilising different spatial frequency channels. In the proposed technique, the authors model centre-surround receptive field using difference of Gaussians (DoG), whereas to mimic multiple frequencies in the centre-surround receptive field, they compute multiple DoG images of different values of standard deviations generated for different frequencies. Furthermore, the singular value decomposition-based features are obtained from the generated DoG images to estimate the image quality. The proposed technique does not require any training, neither based on distorted/original images nor based on subjective human scores, to assess the image quality. The performance of the proposed technique is being analysed on LIVE, TID08, CSIQ and SD-IVL databases and it shows that the proposed technique outperforms recently proposed NR and no-training/training-based IQA techniques. Experimental validation of the proposed technique in the big-data scenario of 10,000 noisy images also shows encouraging results. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2018