A Deep Evaluator for Image Retargeting Quality by Geometrical and Contextual Interaction

An image is compressed or stretched during the multidevice displaying, which will have a very big impact on perception quality. In order to solve this problem, a variety of image retargeting methods have been proposed for the retargeting process. However, how to evaluate the results of different image retargeting is a very critical issue. In various application systems, the subjective evaluation method cannot be applied on a large scale. So we put this problem in the accurate objective-quality evaluation. Currently, most of the image retargeting quality assessment algorithms use simple regression methods as the last step to obtain the evaluation result, which are not corresponding with the perception simulation in the human vision system (HVS). In this paper, a deep quality evaluator for image retargeting based on the segmented stacked AutoEnCoder (SAE) is proposed. Through the help of regularization, the designed deep learning framework can solve the overfitting problem. The main contributions in this framework are to simulate the perception of retargeted images in HVS. Especially, it trains two separated SAE models based on geometrical shape and content matching. Then, the weighting schemes can be used to combine the obtained scores from two models. Experimental results in three well-known databases show that our method can achieve better performance than traditional methods in evaluating different image retargeting results.