Local and Global Feature Learning for Blind Quality Evaluation of Screen Content and Natural Scene Images

The blind quality evaluation of screen content images (SCIs) and natural scene images (NSIs) has become an important, yet very challenging issue. In this paper, we present an effective blind quality evaluation technique for SCIs and NSIs based on a dictionary of learned local and global quality features. First, a local dictionary is constructed using local normalized image patches and conventional K-means clustering. With this local dictionary, the learned local quality features can be obtained using a locality-constrained linear coding with max pooling. To extract the learned global quality features, the histogram representations of binary patterns are concatenated to form a global dictionary. The collaborative representation algorithm is used to efficiently code the learned global quality features of the distorted images using this dictionary. Finally, kernel-based support vector regression is used to integrate these features into an overall quality score. Extensive experiments involving the proposed evaluation technique demonstrate that in comparison with most relevant metrics, the proposed blind metric yields significantly higher consistency in line with subjective fidelity ratings.