Biologically inspired image quality assessment

Image quality assessment (IQA) aims at developing computational models that can precisely and automatically estimate human perceived image quality. To date, various IQA methods have been proposed to mimic the processing of the human visual system, with limited success. Here, we present a novel IQA approach named biologically inspired feature similarity (BIFS), which is demonstrated to be highly consistent with the human perception. In the proposed approach, biologically inspired features (BIFs) of the test image and the relevant reference image are first extracted. Afterwards, local similarities between the reference BIFs and the distorted ones are calculated and then combined to obtain a final quality index. Thorough experiments on a number of IQA databases demonstrate that the proposed method is highly effective and robust, and outperform state-of-the-art FR-IQA methods across various datasets. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.