Quality of experience assessment for stereoscopic images

Stereoscopic image quality assessment has been widely studied in last decades; however, the research on 3D quality of experience (QoE) is proposed recently. As a part of human stereo perception, 3D QoE plays an important role to stereoscopic image quality assessment. In this paper, an objective metric is proposed based on the hypothesis that binocular vision system is sensitive to the structure of low-level features and its discrepancy between the two view images of a stereoscopic image pair. Specifically, the correlation between the left and right views of a stereoscopic image pair could reflect the QoE. To represent the structure of low-level features, in each view of the stereoscopic image pair, the phase congruency (PC) and the saliency map are employed as the primary and secondary features to compose a feature map. To compute the correlation between the two views, a local matching function is suggested to weight the discrepancy between the two feature maps and generate a local quality. Then these local quality values are combined to derive a single quality score. The proposed metric is evaluated on one public subjective assessment database. The experimental results indicate that our metric exhibits good performance.