On the assessment of the quality of textures in visual media

Textures are being extensively used in next-generation video coding, image restoration and computer graphics wherein the stochastic and perceptual properties of textures are exploited. Given the prominence of texture content in image and video processing applications, texture quality assessment and objective quality metrics geared specifically towards texture are of particular importance. This paper outlines an extensive subjective study in which a total of 340 distorted images extracted from 10 reference images were evaluated by a group of 20 human subjects. The subjective Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) thus obtained from the study were used to evaluate several existing mainstream full reference quality metrics with the help of a recently developed quality assessment framework (IVQUEST). Based on the results obtained, it can be concluded that traditional objective metrics do not perform well on texture images and there is a need for specialized texture quality metrics.