Visual coherence metric for evaluation of color image restoration

Digital image inpainting technique could provide substantial support for future restoration of images. However, much less effort has been devoted to the development of image inpainting evaluation. In this paper, we proposed a novel objective metric for assessing the quality of color image inpainting which takes into account some constraints and characteristics related to the specific objectives of inpainting approaches. The used characteristics are the visual coherence of the recovered regions and the visual saliency describing the visual importance of the area. A series of psychophysical experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed image quality index. The results show that the proposed image quality metric is well adapted for image quality inpainting evaluation.