Decision Fusion for Image Quality Assessment using an Optimization Approach

The proliferation of electronic means of communication entails distortion of visual information carried by processed images. Therefore, automatic evaluation of image perceptual quality in a way that is consistent with human perception is important. In this letter, an approach to full-reference image quality assessment (IQA) is proposed. The perceptual quality of the image is evaluated using an aggregated decision of several IQA measures. An optimization problem of designing a decision fusion of 18 IQA measures is defined and solved using a genetic algorithm. Obtained fusion strategies are evaluated on widely used large image benchmarks and compared with 32 state-of-the-art IQA approaches. Results of comparison reveal that the proposed approach outperforms other competing techniques.