Image quality assessment for free viewpoint video based on mid-level contours feature

Abstract

Free view point video (FVV), which offers immersive experience to users with multiple views, is one of the new trends in advanced visual media. These new viewpoints are traditionally synthesized via depth image-based rendering(DIBR) and geometric distortions are therefore observed. Mid-level contours descriptors are capable of evaluating such edges incoherence among the synthesized images which common image quality metrics fail to capture. In this paper, we use the concept of ‘Sketch Token’, that is a mid-level contours descriptor, and introduce a novel metric for DIBR-synthesized image quality assessment by measuring how classes of contours change after synthesis. Experiments are conducted on the IRCCyN/IVC DIBR image database and the results show that the proposed metric achieves a correlation of 88.77% which is comparable to state-of-the-art metrics like MW-PSNR and MP-PSNR.