A Saliency Dispersion Measure for Improving Saliency-Based Image Quality Metrics

Objective image quality metrics (IQMs) potentially benefit from the addition of visual saliency. However, challenges to optimizing the performance of saliency-based IQMs remain. A previous eye-tracking study has shown that gaze is concentrated in fewer places in images with highly salient features than in images lacking salient features. From this, it can be inferred that the former are more likely to benefit from adding a saliency term to an IQM. To understand whether these ideas still hold when using computational saliency instead of eye-tracking data, we first conducted a statistical evaluation using 15 state-of-the-art saliency models and 10 well-known IQMs. We then used the results to devise an algorithm, which adaptively incorporates saliency in IQMs for natural scenes, based on saliency dispersion. Experimental results demonstrate that this can give significant improvements.