Learning a blind image quality index based on visual saliency guided sampling and Gabor filtering

The goal of no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is to estimate the quality of an image consistent with the human perception of the image automatically without any prior of the reference image. In this paper, we present a simple yet efficient and effective approach to learn a blind Image Quality index based on Visual saliency guided sampling and Gabor filtering, namely IQVG. Given an image, we at first randomly sample a sufficient number of image patches guided by the image's visual saliency map and convolve each patch with Gabor filters to get a bag of features. Then, the image is represented by using a histogram to encode the bag of features. Support vector regression (SVR) is used to learn the mapping from feature space to image quality. Extensive experiments conducted on the LIVE IQA database demonstrate the overall superiority of our IQVG over the other state-of-the-art NR-IQA algorithms evaluated. The Matlab source code of IQVG and the evaluation results are available online at http://sse.tongji.edu.cn/linzhang/IQA/IQVG/IQVG.htm.