A Novel Blind Image Quality Assessment Method Based on Refined Natural Scene Statistics

Natural scene statistics (NSS) model has received considerable attention in the image quality assessment (IQA) community due to its high sensitivity to image distortion. However, most existing NSS-based IQA methods extract features either from spatial domain or from transform domain. There is little work to simultaneously consider the features from these two domains. In this paper, a novel blind IQA method (NBIQA) based on refined NSS is proposed. The proposed NBIQA first investigates the performance of a large number of candidate features from both the spatial and transform domains. Based on the investigation, we construct a refined NSS model by selecting competitive features from existing NSS models and adding three new features. Then the refined NSS is fed into SVM tool to learn a simple regression model. Finally, the trained regression model is used to predict the scalar quality score of the image. Experimental results tested on both LIVE IQA and LIVE-C databases show that the proposed NBIQA performs better in terms of synthetic and authentic image distortion than current mainstream IQA methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/GZU-Image-Video-Lab/NBIQA.