Edge Strength Similarity for Image Quality Assessment

The objective image quality assessment aims to model the perceptual fidelity of semantic information between two images. In this letter, we assume that the semantic information of images is fully represented by edge-strength of each pixel and propose an edge-strength-similarity-based image quality metric (ESSIM). Through investigating the characteristics of the edge in images, we define the edge-strength to take both anisotropic regularity and irregularity of the edge into account. The proposed ESSIM is considerably simple, however, it can achieve slightly better performance than the state-of-the-art image quality metrics as evaluated on six subject-rated image databases.