A new free reference image quality index based on perceptual blur estimation

Abstract

A new free reference image quality index based on the perceptual blur estimation is proposed. Here, we limit the study to isotropic blurring degradation although the principle could be extended to other distortions. The main idea developed here is to exploit the limitation of the blurring discriminability of the Human Visual System (HVS). The proposed method consists of adding a small amount of blur to the image and measuring its impact on the image quality level. From the two images, a perceptual map is then obtained using some HVS characteristics. A quality index is finally derived by extracting some geometrical features from the blurring map visibility. The obtained results are compared with some known methods. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.