No-reference stereoscopic image quality assessment based on binocular collaboration

Stereoscopic images typically consist of left and right views along with depth information. Assessing the quality of stereoscopic/3D images (SIQA) is often more complex than that of 2D images due to scene disparities between the left and right views and the intricate process of fusion in binocular vision. To address the problem of quality prediction bias of multi-distortion images, we investigated the visual physiology and the processing of visual information by the primary visual cortex of the human brain and proposed a no-reference stereoscopic image quality evaluation method. The method mainly includes an innovative end-to-end NR-SIQA neural network with a picture patch generation algorithm. The algorithm generates a saliency map by fusing the left and right views and then guides the image cropping in the database based on the saliency map. The proposed models are validated and compared based on publicly available databases. The results show that the model and algorithm together outperform the state-of-the-art NR-SIQA metric in the LIVE 3D database and the WIVC 3D database, and have excellent results in the specific noise metric. The model generalization experiments demonstrate a certain degree of generality of our proposed model.