Image retargeting quality assessment based on content deformation measurement

Content-aware based image retargeting methods aim at visualizing source images on diverse display devices with different aspect ratios while preventing the incurrence of visual distortions as far as possible. An objective retargeting assessment method, which has a high consistency with subjective perception, can measure the retargeting effects of different retargeting methods, thus promoting the development of retargeting technology. However, the correlation between the existing objective evaluation methods and subjective evaluation is not strong enough. In this paper, we propose an objective retargeting assessment method by fusing multiple features to quantify the content loss and structural deformation caused by retargeting. In order to measure the global deformation, there are two features are proposed which are elastic registration based on B-spline function and foreground retention ratio. Moreover, improved Aspect Ratio Similarity (IARS) and concentrated deletion ratio make for better detection of local deformation. These features are fused to obtain the objective retargeting assessment method. Compared with the state-of-art objective assessment methods on three public datasets, the proposed method has a better correlation with subjective perception.