New no-reference blocking artifacts metric based on human visual system

Block-based discrete cosine transform (BDCT) is an important tool in the image and video compression. Blocking artifacts caused by BDCT may be noticeable in the decoded image under low bit-rate conditions. Measuring blocking artifacts is of great significance in the evaluation of image and video image. To ensure reliability of the model outputs, a new no-reference blocking artifacts metric is proposed in this paper, based on human vision sensitivity by the research on a model of luminance and texture masking. Furthermore, blocking artifacts are measured with different weighting coefficient in flat regions and edge regions, respectively. Compared with Wang´s blind measurement of blocking artifacts, experimental results illustrate that the proposed metric has better consistency to the visual perception, and it can reflect the image quality more effectively.