Gaussian Process-based Feature-Enriched Blind Image Quality Assessment

The objective of blind-image quality assessment (BIQA) research is the prediction of perceptual quality of images, without reference information. The human's perceptual assessment of quality of an image is the backbone of BIQA research. Therefore, human-provided, mean opinion score (perceptual quality) has been analyzed in detail, and it has been observed to follow the Gaussian distribution and thus can be ideally modeled by the same. In this paper, we have proposed an integrated two-stage Gaussian process-based hybrid-feature selection algorithm for the BIQA problem. Moreover, a new consolidated feature set (obtained from the proposed algorithm), consisting of momentous Natural Scene Statistics (NSS)-based features is used in combination with the Gaussian process regression algorithm for the design of a new blind-image quality evaluator, referred to as GPR-BIQA. The proposed evaluator is tested on eight IQA legacy databases, and it is found that the proposed evaluator proficiently correlate with the human opinion, and outperformed a substantial number of existing approaches. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.