Reduced-reference image quality assessment based on entropy differences in DCT domain

Reduced-reference image quality assessment (RR-IQA) algorithm aims to automatically evaluate the image quality using only partial information about the reference image. In this paper, we propose a new RR-IQA metric by employing the entropy features of each frequency band in the DCT domain. It is well known that human eyes have different sensitivity to different bands, and distortions on each band result in individual quality degradations. Therefore, we suggest to separately compute the visual information degradations on different band for quality assessment. The degradations on each DCT band are firstly analyzed according to the entropy difference. And then, the quality score is obtained using the weighted sum of the entropy difference of each band from low frequency to high frequency. Experimental results on several public image databases show that the proposed method uses limited reference data (8 values) and performs highly consistent with human perception.