Blind Stereoscopic Image Quality Assessment Based on Hierarchical Learning

We proposed a blind image quality assessment model which used classification and prediction for three-dimensional (3D) image quality assessment (denoted as CAP-3DIQA) that can automatically evaluate the quality of stereoscopic images. First, in the classification stage, the model separated the distorted images into several subsets according to the types of image distortions. This process will assign the images with the same distortion type to the same group. After the classification stage, the classified distorted image set is fed into the image quality predictor that contains five different perceptual channels which predict the image quality score individually. Finally, we used the regression module of the support vector machine to evaluate the final image quality score, where the input of the regression model is the combination of five channel’s outputs. The model, we proposed is tested on three public and popular databases, which are LIVE 3D Image Quality Database Phase I, LIVE 3D Image Quality Database Phase II, and MCL 3D Image Quality Database. The experimental results show that our proposed model leads to significant performance improvement on quality prediction for stereoscopic images compared with other existing state-of-the-art quality metrics.