BGT: A blind image quality evaluator via gradient and texture statistical features

Abstract Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) aims to design a model that can accurately evaluate the quality of the distorted image without any information about its reference image. Previous studies have shown that gradients and textures of image is widely used in image quality evaluation tasks. However, few studies used the joint statistics of gradient and texture information to evaluate image quality. Considering the visual perception characteristics of the human visual system, we develop a novel general-purpose BIQA model via two sets of complementary perception features. Specifically, the joint statistical histograms of gradient and texture are extracted as the first set of features, and the second set of features is extracted using the local binary pattern (LBP) operator. After extracting two groups of complementary quality-aware features, the feature vectors are sent to the support vector regression machine to establish the nonlinear relationship between quality-aware features and quality scores. A large number of experiments on seven large benchmark databases show that the proposed BIQA model has higher accuracy, better generalization properties and lower computational complexity than the relevant state-of-the-art BIQA metrics.