A Full-Reference Quality Metric for Geometrically Distorted Images

In multimedia applications, there has been an increasing interest in the use of quality measures based on human perception; however, research has not dealt with distortions due to geometric transformations. In this paper, we propose a method to objectively assess the perceptual quality of geometrically distorted images, based on image features processed by human vision. The proposed approach is a full-reference image quality metric focusing on the problem of local geometric distortions and is based on the use of Gabor filters that have received considerable attention because the characteristics of certain cells in the visual cortex of some mammals can be approximated by these filters. The novelty of the proposed technique is that it considers both the displacement field describing the distortion and the structure of the image. The experimental results show the good performances of the proposed metric.