Comparison-Based Image Quality Assessment for Selecting Image Restoration Parameters.

Image quality assessment (IQA) is traditionally classified into full-reference (FR) IQA, reduced-reference (RR) IQA, and no-reference (NR) IQA according to the amount of information required from the original image. Although NR-IQA and RR-IQA are widely used in practical applications, room for improvement still remains because of the lack of the reference image. Inspired by the fact that in many applications, such as parameter selection for image restoration algorithms, a series of distorted images are available, the authors propose a novel comparison-based IQA (C-IQA) framework. The new comparison-based framework parallels FR-IQA by requiring two input images and resembles NR-IQA by not using the original image. As a result, the new comparison-based approach has more application scenarios than FR-IQA does, and takes greater advantage of the accessible information than the traditional single-input NR-IQA does. Further, C-IQA is compared with other state-of-the-art NR-IQA methods and another RR-IQA method on two widely used IQA databases. Experimental results show that C-IQA outperforms the other methods for parameter selection, and the parameter trimming framework combined with C-IQA saves the computation of iterative image reconstruction up to 80%.