Quality assessment of chromatic variations: A study of Full-Reference and No-Reference Metrics

This work describes a comparative study on the ability of Full-Reference versus No-Reference quality metrics to measure the Quality of Experience created by images that suffer chromatic variations. Considering this, some well known Full-Reference (PSNR, UQI, MSSIM) and No-Reference (GM, FTM, RTBM) will be compared with the MOS results. Although the quality metrics considered are usually applied to the luminance component, in this study they are applied to the Y, C_b, C_r components separately. The result of the three components average metrics was also considered, because only the image chromatic components have been changed resulting in similar values of luminance. The correlation estimates show that the Full-Reference Metrics namely the MSSIM and the UQI provide a good representation of the subjective results. Moreover, the studied No-Reference metrics also provide an acceptable representation, although their reliability is less effective.