Objective Stereoscopic Image Quality Assessment Method for 3DV System

Stereoscopic imaging technology has aroused a great concern recently due to the increasingly wide range of stereoscopic applications. Stereoscopic image quality assessment is of vital importance to evaluate the performance of three-dimensional video (3DV) systems. However, stereoscopic image quality assessment methods are very scarce presently. In the paper, according to human visual sensitivities to different regions with different scales, an objective stereoscopic image quality assessment (OSIQA) model is proposed to predict visual quality of a stereoscopic image. The structural differences among scales and regions are firstly calculated to obtain the left-right image quality assessment (LR-IQA) index after multi-scale decomposition. Then, a concept of absolute disparity image is defined to describe absolute difference between the left and the right images, and the changes referring to the brightness, structure and pixel statistical information between the original and the distorted absolute disparity images are regarded to gain the stereoscopic perception image quality assessment (SP-IQA) index. Finally, according to the weights of LR-IQA and SP-IQA indices, LR-IQA and SP-IQA are combined into OSIQA. Experimental results show that the proposed method closely approximates subjective evaluation with the correlation coefficient of 0.938, the Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient of 0.946, and the root mean square error of 5.952 for all the five distortions, including Gaussian blurring, Gaussian white noise, JP2K, JPEG and H264 compressions.