Contrast-distorted image quality assessment based on curvelet domain features

Contrast is one of the most popular forms of distortion. Recently, the existing image quality assessment algorithms (IQAs) works focusing on distorted images by compression, noise and blurring. Reduced-reference image quality metric for contrast-changed images (RIQMC) and no reference-image quality assessment (NR-IQA) for contrast-distorted images (NR-IQA-CDI) have been created for CDI. NR-IQA-CDI showed poor performance in two out of three image databases, where the Pearson correlation coefficient (PLCC) were only 0.5739 and 0.7623 in TID2013 and CSIQ database, respectively. Spatial domain features are the basis of NR-IQA-CDI architecture. Therefore, in this paper, the spatial domain features are complementary with curvelet domain features, in order to take advantage of the potent properties of the curvelet in extracting information from images such as multiscale and multidirectional. The experimental outcome rely on K-fold cross validation (K ranged 2-10) and statistical test showed that the performance of NR-IQA-CDI rely on curvelet domain features (NR-IQA-CDI-CvT) significantly surpasses those which are rely on five spatial domain features.