No-reference image quality assessment using interval type 2 fuzzy sets

• Human visual perception in assessing image quality using type 2 fuzzy sets.
• Entropy of visually salient regions measure uncertainty in feature space.
• Transformation of features to interval type 2 fuzzy feature space.
• Free from type reduction and defuzzification computation.
• Promising results compared to prominent subjective and objective image quality metrics.

Image quality assessment of distorted or decompressed images without any reference to the original image is challenging from computational point of view. Quality of an image is best judged by human observers without any reference image, and evaluated using subjective measures. The paper aims at designing a generic no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) method by incorporating human visual perception in assigning quality class labels to the images. Using fuzzy logic approach, we consider information theoretic entropies of visually salient regions of images as features and assess quality of the images using linguistic values. The features are transformed into fuzzy feature space by designing an algorithm based on interval type-2 (IT2) fuzzy sets. The algorithm measures uncertainty present in the input–output feature space to predict image quality accurately as close to human observations. We have taken a set of training images belonging to five different pre-assigned quality class labels for calculating foot print of uncertainty (FOU) corresponding to each class. To assess the quality class label of the test images, maximum of T-conorm applied on the lower and upper membership functions of the test images belonging to different classes is calculated. Our proposed image quality metric is compared with other no-reference quality metrics demonstrating more accurate results and compatible with subjective mean opinion score metric.

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