A Simplified Human Vision Model Applied to a Blocking Artifact Metric

A novel approach towards a simplified, though still reliable human vision model based on the spatial masking properties of the human visual system (HVS) is presented. The model contains two basic characteristics of the HVS, namely texture masking and luminance masking. These masking effects are implemented as simple spatial filtering followed by a weighting function, and are efficiently combined into a single visibility coefficient. This HVS model is applied to a blockiness metric by using its output to scale the blockedge strength. To validate the proposed model, its performance in the blockiness metric is determined by comparing it to the same blockiness metric having different HVS-based models embedded. The results show that the proposed model is indeed simple, without compromising its accuracy.