Visual attention tuned spatio-velocity contrast sensitivity for video quality assessment

Contrast sensitivity is an important characteristic of the human visual system (HVS), which is widely used in image and video signal processing. For visual quality assessment, static spatio-temporal frequency based contrast sensitivity function (CSF) is often used, while the contrast sensitivity can also be affected by smooth pursuit of eyes when tracking attentive regions in the field of view. This paper proposes to tune CSF based on an attention map derived from a visual attention model. The tuned CSF formulated by spatial frequency, temporal velocity, and visual attention map is used to filter video signals in order to construct a quality metric according to the difference of the filtered signals between a reference video and its distorted version. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed attention tuned spatio-velocity CSF outperforms the traditional spatio-temporal CSF in evaluating the perceived video quality.