Subjective image-quality estimation based on psychophysical experimentation

Abstract

The purpose of estimating subjective image quality is to provide best-quality image content to users in diverse fields. Image quality is subjective, therefore very difficult to estimate accurately, and so many researchers have proposed psychophysical experimentation as a means of estimating it. Conventional methods describe the relationship between the subjective preference and the perceived contrast as an "inverted U" shape. However, the relationship was resulted from only a few, high-quality images. Thus, they are inadequate for general image-quality estimation. In this paper, we carried out two experiments using a dataset with untransformed and various images. We discovered an important property that the preference increases in proportion to the perceived contrast. The result shows us not only that our experimentation can reduce MSE of image-quality estimation by approximately 40% over the previous methods, but also that it can be applied in various applications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.