Towards an efficient model of visual saliency for objective image quality assessment

Based on “ground truth” eye-tracking data, earlier research [1] shows that adding natural scene saliency (NSS) can improve an objective metric´s performance in predicting perceived image quality. To include NSS in a real-world implementation of an objective metric, a computational model instead of eye-tracking data is needed. Existing models of visual saliency are generally designed for a specific domain, and so, not applicable to image quality prediction. In this paper, we propose an efficient model for NSS, inspired by findings from our eye-tracking studies. Experimental results show that the proposed model sufficiently captures the saliency of the eye-tracking data, and applying the model to objective image quality metrics enhances their performance in the same manner as when including eye-tracking data.