Human Visual Perception-based Image Quality Analyzer for Assessment of Contrast Enhancement Methods

Soong Chen

College of Information Technology, University Tenaga Nasional, Malaysia

Abstract: Absolute Mean Brightness Error (AMBE) and entropy are two popular Image Quality Analyzer (IQA) metrics used for assessment of Histogram Equalization (HE)-based contrast enhancement methods. However, recent study shows that they have poor correlation with Human Visual Perception (HVP); Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC)<0.4. This paper, proposed a new IQA which takes into account important properties of HVP with respect to luminance, texture and scale. evaluation results show that the proposed IQA has significantly improved performance (PCC>0.9). It outperforms all IQAs in study, including two prominent IQAs designed for assessment of image fidelity in image coding-multi-scale structural similarity and information fidelity criterion.

Keywords: IQA, visual perception, distortions, contrast enhancement.