How Do Image Quality Metrics Perform on Contrast Enhanced Images?

For many years different objective Image Quality Metrics (IQMs) have been introduced with the goal of modeling the perceptual quality scores given by observers. While these IQMs perform well on evaluating the quality of distorted images, little attention has been paid on how they perform when applied on enhanced images. Therefore, we focus on the performance of IQMs on contrast enhanced images. We have collected a dataset of images and applied four contrast enhancement techniques on them. A subjective test is then performed on the images in our dataset. Finally, we measured the objective quality of images using different IQMs. The results showed the IQMs are not well correlated with the perceived quality of images when contrast has been enhanced.