Image Quality Assessment Using the Motif Scan

Image quality assessment (IQA) evaluates the quality of an image by computing the difference between the reference and distorted images. This paper proposes an image quality metric (IQM) that uses the motif scan. Since edges often contain much information on an image and the human visual system is highly adapted for extracting structural information from a scene, we propose a new IQM comparing the similarity of 3×3 block motif scans between the reference and distorted images, where the center of the block is located at edge pixel. A 3×3 block is divided into four overlapping 2×2 grids with the center pixel located at four different corners. The modified versions of the proposed IQM using the uniform and Gaussian weights are also proposed. Experiments with LIVE database for five different distortion types of test images show that the proposed metric gives better performance than the conventional IQMs.