IEEE Trans Image Process. 2014 Apr;23(4):1527-42. doi: 10.1109/TIP.2014.2302686.
The objective approaches of 3D image quality assessment play a key role for the development of compression standards and various 3D multimedia applications. The quality assessment of 3D images faces more new challenges, such as asymmetric stereo compression, depth perception, and virtual view synthesis, than its 2D counterparts. In addition, the widely used 2D image quality metrics (e.g., PSNR and SSIM) cannot be directly applied to deal with these newly introduced challenges. This statement can be verified by the low correlation between the computed objective measures and the subjectively measured mean opinion scores (MOSs), when 3D images are the tested targets. In order to meet these newly introduced challenges, in this paper, besides traditional 2D image metrics, the binocular integration behaviors-the binocular combination and the binocular frequency integration, are utilized as the bases for measuring the quality of stereoscopic 3D images. The effectiveness of the proposed metrics is verified by conducting subjective evaluations on publicly available stereoscopic image databases. Experimental results show that significant consistency could be reached between the measured MOS and the proposed metrics, in which the correlation coefficient between them can go up to 0.88. Furthermore, we found that the proposed metrics can also address the quality assessment of the synthesized color-plus-depth 3D images well. Therefore, it is our belief that the binocular integration behaviors are important factors in the development of objective quality assessment for 3D images.
三维图像质量评估的客观方法在压缩标准和各种三维多媒体应用的发展中起着关键作用。与二维图像相比，三维图像的质量评估面临着更多的新挑战，如非对称立体压缩、深度感知和虚拟视图合成。此外，广泛使用的二维图像质量指标（如 PSNR 和 SSIM）不能直接应用于处理这些新引入的挑战。当三维图像作为测试目标时，计算出的客观度量与主观测量的平均意见得分（MOS）之间的低相关性可以验证这一说法。为了应对这些新引入的挑战，在本文中，除了传统的二维图像指标外，我们还利用双目整合行为，即双目组合和双目频率整合，作为衡量立体三维图像质量的基础。通过对公共可用的立体图像数据库进行主观评估，验证了所提出的度量标准的有效性。实验结果表明，所提出的度量标准与主观测量的 MOS 之间可以达到显著的一致性，其中它们之间的相关系数可以高达 0.88。此外，我们发现所提出的度量标准也可以很好地评估合成的彩色加深度三维图像的质量。因此，我们相信双目整合行为是三维图像客观质量评估发展的重要因素。
