Study on subjective quality assessment of Screen Content Images

With the coming age of big data, the cloud technology, referred to as the computations or applications through the Internet, is dramatically developed. The screen content has become one of the most common data form due to the extraordinary advance of network communication technology, and the JCT-VC has started to develop new standard focusing on improving the efficiency of screen content based on High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). Nevertheless, the research on the quality assessment of screen content is still quite limited at the current stage. In this paper, we present a study on subjective quality assessment of the Screen Content Images (SCIs) and investigate whether the existing objective Image Quality Assessment (IQA) methods can effectively evaluate the quality of distorted SCIs. We construct a new Screen Content Database (SCD) including 24 source SCIs and 492 compressed ones with two codecs including HEVC as well as the HEVC extension. The Single Comparison (SC) method is employed for the subjective viewing to guarantee the reliability of the results. In our experiment, the correlations of eight popular IQA methods with the obtained Mean Opinion Score (MOS) values are evaluated. The result indicates that visual information fidelity method can achieve highest consistency with human visual perception.