Visual Orientation Selectivity Based Structure Description

The human visual system is highly adaptive to extract structure information for scene perception, and structure character is widely used in perception-oriented image processing works. However, the existing structure descriptors mainly describe the luminance contrast of a local region, but cannot effectively represent the spatial correlation of structure. In this paper, we introduce a novel structure descriptor according to the orientation selectivity mechanism in the primary visual cortex. Research on cognitive neuroscience indicate that the arrangement of excitatory and inhibitory cortex cells arise orientation selectivity in a local receptive field, within which the primary visual cortex performs visual information extraction for scene understanding. Inspired by the orientation selectivity mechanism, we compute the correlations among pixels in a local region based on the similarities of their preferred orientation. By imitating the arrangement of the excitatory/inhibitory cells, the correlations between a central pixel and its local neighbors are binarized, and the spatial correlation is represented with a set of binary values, which is named the orientation selectivity-based pattern. Then, taking both the gradient magnitude and the orientation selectivity-based pattern into account, a rotation invariant structure descriptor is introduced. The proposed structure descriptor is applied in texture classification and reduced reference image quality assessment, as two different application domains to verify its generality and robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that the orientation selectivity-based structure descriptor is robust to disturbance, and can effectively represent the structure degradation caused by different types of distortion.