Quaternion representation based visual saliency for stereoscopic image quality assessment

In this paper, a novel visual saliency detection method for stereoscopic images is proposed for the stereoscopic image quality assessment (SIQA) by considering the disparity map and difference image between the stereo image pairs. Firstly, a new quaternion representation (QR) of each stereo image (left/right view image) is constructed, which comprises the image content, the inter-view disparity, and the difference map. The quaternion Fourier transform (QFT) is performed on the constructed QR to generate the visual saliency maps for left and right views of stereoscopic image pairs, respectively. The generated visual saliency maps are further incorporated into the quality metrics for SIQA. Experimental results demonstrate that the visual saliency maps generated by the proposed method can help significantly boost the performance of SIQA, comparing with other visual saliency models proposed for stereoscopic images. It further confirms that the proposed visual saliency model can accurate depict the acuity property of human visual system (HVS) in judging the perceptual quality of stereoscopic images.