Objective quality assessment of retargeted images based on RBF neural network with structural distortion and content change

Objective quality assessment of retargeted images aims to find the best retargeting method for showing an image on different display terminals. This paper uses a Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network to assess the quality of retargeted images. First, invariant feature points in the original image and their counterparts in the retargeted image are matched in a spatial order-preserving manner. Feature points centered local patches are extracted from original and retargeted images. Then, multi-scale local structural similarity and multi-scale local HSV color histograms difference of matched local patches are measured. A saliency map is employed as the weights of the local patches for evaluating the structural distortion and content change. Finally, the overall assessment of the retargeted image quality can be obtained by the RBF neural network. Experimental results on a benchmark test show the high consistency between the proposed objective assessment and subjective evaluations, and our method is closer to the practical application due to its simplicity compared with those complex ones.