Boosting in image quality assessment

In this paper, we analyze the effect of boosting in image quality assessment through multi-method fusion. On the contrary of existing studies that propose a single quality estimator, we investigate the generalizability of multi-method fusion as a framework. In addition to support vector machines that are commonly used in the multi-method fusion studies, we propose using neural networks in the boosting. To span different types of image quality assessment algorithms, we use quality estimators based on fidelity, perceptually-extended fidelity, structural similarity, spectral similarity, color, and learning. In the experiments, we perform k-fold cross validation using the LIVE, the multiply distorted LIVE, and the TID 2013 databases and the performance of image quality assessment algorithms are measured via accuracy-, linearity-, and ranking-based metrics. Based on the experiments, we show that boosting methods generally improve the performance of image quality assessment and the level of improvement depends on the type of the boosting algorithm. Our experimental results also indicate that boosting the worst performing quality estimator with two or more methods lead to statistically significant performance enhancements independent of the boosting technique and neural network-based boosting outperforms support vector machine-based boosting when two or more methods are fused.