Perceptual Quality Assessment for Recognizing True and Pseudo 4k Content

Abstract

To meet the imperative demand for monitoring the quality of Ultra High-Definition (UHD) content in multimedia industries, we propose an efficient no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) metric to distinguish original and pseudo 4K contents and measure the quality of their quality in this paper. First, we establish a database including more than 3000 4K images composed of natural 4K images together with upscaled versions interpolated from 1080p and 720p images by fourteen algorithms. To improve computing efficiency, our model segments the input image and selects three representative patches by local variances. Then, we extract the histogram features and cut-off frequency features in the frequency domain as well as the natural scenes statistic (NSS) based features from the representative patches. Finally, we employ support vector regressor (SVR) to aggregate these extracted features as an overall quality metric to predict the quality score of the target image. Extensive experimental comparisons using seven common evaluation indicators demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the competitive NR IQA methods and has a great ability to distinguish true and pseudo 4K images.