Perceptual Gradient Similarity Deviation for Full Reference Image Quality Assessment

Perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) is one of the most indispensable yet challenging problems in image processing and computer vision. It is quite necessary to develop automatic and efficient approaches that can accurately predict perceptual image quality consistently with human subjective evaluation. To further improve the prediction accuracy for the distortion of color images, in this paper, we propose a novel effective and efficient IQA model, called perceptual gradient similarity deviation (PGSD). Based on the gradient magnitude similarity, we proposed a gradient direction selection method to automatically determine the pixel-wise perceptual gradient. The luminance and chrominance channels are both took into account to characterize the quality degradation caused by intensity and color distortions. Finally, a multi-scale strategy is utilized and pooled with different weights to incorporate image details at different resolutions. Experimental results on LIVE, CSIQ and TID2013 databases demonstrate the superior performances of the proposed algorithm.