Stereo Image Quality Assessment Considering the Asymmetry of Statistical Information in Early Visual Pathway

The design of stereo image quality assessment (SIQA) methods cannot be well based on the biological theory of human vision, so the performance of many SIQA methods cannot achieve good consistency with the subjective perception. The research on the visual system tends to the dorsal and ventral pathways, which ignores the information asymmetry in the early visual pathways. It is worth noting that the ON and OFF receptive fields in retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) respond asymmetrically to the statistical features of images. Inspired by this, we propose a SIQA method based on monocular and binocular visual features, which takes into account the asymmetry of local contrast bright and dark features in early visual pathways. First, this paper extracts the response maps of ON and OFF cell in RGCs to left and right views respectively. And then the different information fusion modes of visual cortex are used to fuse the response maps information of left and right views. Final, monocular and binocular features were extracted and sent to support vector regression (SVR) for quality regression. Experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to several mainstream SIQA metrics on two publicly available databases.