Blind image quality assessment based on wavelet power spectrum in perceptual domain

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) can assess the perceptual quality of a distorted image without a prior knowledge of its reference image or distortion type. In this paper, a novel BIQA model is developed in wavelet domain. Considering the multi-resolution and band-passing characteristics of discrete wavelet transform (DWT), an improvement over the power spectrum is put forward, i.e., dubbed wavelet power spectrum (WPS) estimation. Then, the concept of directional WPS is applied to simplify the calculation. Moreover, a rotationally symmetric modulation transfer function (MTF) of human visual system (HVS) is integrated as a filter, which makes the metric to be consistent with the human vision perception and more discriminative. Experiments are conducted on the LIVE databases and three other databases, and the results show that the proposed metric is highly correlated with subjective evaluations and it competes well with other state-of-the-art metrics in terms of effectiveness and robustness.