Foveation-based image quality assessment

Since human vision has much greater resolutions at the center of our visual field than elsewhere, different criteria of quality assessment should be applied on the image areas with different visual resolutions. This paper proposed a foveation-based image quality assessment method which adopted different sizes of windows in quality assessment for a single image. Visual salience models which estimate visual attention regions are used to determine the foveation center and foveation resolution models are used to guide the selection of window sizes for the areas over spatial extent of the image. Finally, the quality scores obtained from different window sizes are pooled together to get a single value for the image. The proposed method has been applied to IQA metrics, SSIM, PSNR, and UQI. The result shows that both Spearman and Kendall correlation coefficients can be improved significantly by our foveation-based method.