No-reference Image Blur Assessment Based on Multi-scale Spatial Local Features

Abstract

Blur is an important type of image distortion. How to evaluate the quality of blurred image accurately and efficiently is a research hotspot in the field of image processing in recent years. Inspired by the multi-scale perceptual characteristics of the human visual system (HVS), this paper presents a no-reference image blur/sharpness assessment method based on multi-scale local features in the spatial domain. First, considering various content has different sensitivity to blur distortion, the image is divided into smooth, edge, and texture regions in blocks. Then, the Gaussian scale space of the image is constructed, and the categorized contrast features between the original image and the Gaussian scale space images are calculated to express the blur degree of different image contents. To simulate the impact of viewing distance on blur distortion, the distribution characteristics of local maximum gradient of multi-resolution images were also calculated in the spatial domain. Finally, the image blur assessment model is obtained by fusing all features and learning the mapping from features to quality scores by support vector regression (SVR). Performance of the proposed method is evaluated on four synthetically blurred databases and one real blurred database. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can produce quality scores more consistent with subjective evaluations than other methods, especially for real burred images.