Study on subjective quality assessment of Digital Compound Images

Quality assessment of digital compound images is a less investigated research topic. In this paper, we present a study for subjective quality assessment of Digital Compound Images (DCIs), and investigate whether existing Image Quality Assessment (IQA) methods are effective to evaluate the quality of distorted DCIs. A new Compound Image Quality Assessment Database (CIQAD) is constructed, including 24 reference DCIs and their 576 distorted versions. The Paired Comparison (PC) method is employed for the subjective viewing, and the Hodgerank decomposition is adopted to generate incomplete but balanced comparison pairs, so as to reduce the execution time while guaranteeing the reliability of the results. In our experiment, correlation of 14 existing IQA methods with the obtained Mean Opinion Score (MOS) values on the CIQAD is calculated, which indicates that the 14 IQA methods are not consistent with human visual perception when judging DCIs in different conditions. Therefore, objective quality assessment metrics should be specifically designed for DCIs. Our subjective study has delivered convincing information to guide the construction of objective metrics. Furthermore, we has also published the database online to favor future research on quality assessment of DCIs.