Perceptual image quality assessment combining free-energy principle and sparse representation

Since the purpose of objective image quality assessment is to be consistent with subjective image quality assessment as highly as possible, the understanding of the mechanisms of human visual system will certainly benefit the study of objective image quality assessment. Recent developments in brain theory and neuroscience, particularly the free-energy principle, account for the perception and understanding of visual scenes. As the free-energy principle conjectures, the brain tries to generate the corresponding prediction for its encountered scene by an internal generative model. On the other hand, sparse representation is evidenced to resemble the neural response properties of simple cells in the primary visual cortex. Conjunctively, in this paper, we suppose the prediction manner of the internal generative model in free-energy principle follows sparse representation and propose an image quality metric accordingly. Experiments on LIVE, TID2008 and CSIQ image databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed image quality metric. Noteworthily, our metric needs little information (only a single scalar) of the reference image and is training-free.