SPSIM: A Superpixel-Based Similarity Index for Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Full-reference image quality assessment algorithms usually perform comparisons of features extracted from square patches. These patches do not have any visual meanings. On the contrary, a superpixel is a set of image pixels that share similar visual characteristics and is thus perceptually meaningful. Features from superpixels may improve the performance of image quality assessment. Inspired by this, we propose a new superpixel-based similarity index by extracting perceptually meaningful features and revising similarity measures. The proposed method evaluates image quality on the basis of three measurements, namely, superpixel luminance similarity, superpixel chrominance similarity, and pixel gradient similarity. The first two measurements assess the overall visual impression on local images. The third measurement quantifies structural variations. The impact of superpixel-based regional gradient consistency on image quality is also analyzed. Distorted images showing high regional gradient consistency with the corresponding reference images are visually appreciated. Therefore, the three measurements are further revised by incorporating the regional gradient consistency into their computations. A weighting function that indicates superpixel-based texture complexity is utilized in the pooling stage to obtain the final quality score. Experiments on several benchmark databases demonstrate that the proposed method is competitive with the state-of-the-art metrics.