Reduced-reference image quality assessment with local binary structural pattern

Reduced-reference (RR) image quality assessment (IQA) aims to use less reference data and achieve higher quality prediction accuracy. Recent researches confirm that the human visual system (HVS) is adapted to extract structural information and is sensitive to structure degradation. Therefore, in this paper, we try to represent image contents with several structural patterns, and measure image quality according to the structural degradation on these patterns. The classic local binary patterns (LBPs) are firstly employed to extract image structures and create LBP based structural histogram. And then, the structural degradation is computed as the histogram distance between the reference and distorted images. Experimental results on three large databases demonstrate that the proposed RR IQA method greatly improved the quality prediction accuracy.