Analysis of SSIM based Quality Assessment across Color Channels of Images

Advances in imaging and computing hardware have led to an explosion in the use of color images in image processing, graphics and computer vision applications across various domains such as medical imaging, satellite imagery, document analysis and biometrics to name a few. However, these images are subjected to a wide variety of distortions during its acquisition, subsequent compression, transmission, processing and then reproduction, which degrade their visual quality. Hence objective quality assessment of color images has emerged as one of the essential operations in image processing. During the last two decades, efforts have been put to design such an image quality metric which can be calculated simply but can accurately reflect subjective quality of human perception. In this paper, the authors evaluated the quality assessment of color images using SSIM (structural similarity index) metric across various color spaces. They experimented to study the effect of color spaces in metric based and distance based quality assessment. The authors proposed a metric using CIE Lab color space and SSIM, which has better correlation to the subjective assessment in a benchmark dataset.