Visual Horizontal Effect for Image Quality Assessment

In this paper, an image quality metric is proposed by modeling the visual Horizontal Effect (HE) and saliency property over structural distortions. Specifically, Structrue SIMilarity (SSIM) is firstly performed to obtain the structural distortion map. Subsequently, the obtained distortion map is refined by the visual HE model, which depicts visual sensitivities of oriented stimuli over different oriented contents. Finally, in order to describe the local Human Visual System (HVS) conspicuities, a saliency pooling strategy is proposed to generate the resulting image quality index. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method outperforms SSIM and Visual Information Fidelity (VIF), which indicates that the obtained similarity index is more consistent with the perceptual evaluation of image quality.