ReSIFT: Reliability-weighted sift-based image quality assessment

This paper presents a full-reference image quality estimator based on SIFT descriptor matching over reliability-weighted feature maps. Reliability assignment includes a smoothing operation, a transformation to perceptual color domain, a local normalization stage, and a spectral residual computation with global normalization. The proposed method ReSIFT is tested on the LIVE and the LIVE Multiply Distorted databases and compared with 11 state-of-the-art full-reference quality estimators. In terms of the Pearson and the Spearman correlation, ReSIFT is the best performing quality estimator in the overall databases. Moreover, ReSIFT is the best performing quality estimator in at least one distortion group in compression, noise, and blur category.