Papers › Most Apparent Distortion: Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment and the Role of Strategy

Most Apparent Distortion: Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment and the Role of Strategy

1 Jan 2010Journal of Electronic Imaging 2010 1archive 2025-07-28

Eric C. Larson, Damon M. Chandler

The mainstream approach to image quality assessment has centered around accurately modeling the single most relevant strategy employed by the human visual system (HVS) when judging image quality (e.g., detecting visible differences, and extracting image structure/information). In this work, we suggest that a single strategy may not be sufficient; rather, we advocate that the HVS uses multiple strategies to determine image quality. For images containing near-threshold distortions, the image is most apparent, and thus the HVS attempts to look past the image and look for the distortions (a detection-based strategy). For images containing clearly visible distortions, the distortions are most apparent, and thus the HVS attempts to look past the distortion and look for the image’s subject matter (an appearance-based strategy). Here, we present a quality assessment method [most apparent distortion (MAD)], which attempts to explicitly model these two separate strategies. Local luminance and contrast masking are used to estimate detection-based perceived distortion in high-quality images, whereas changes in the local statistics of spatial-frequency components are used to estimate appearance-based perceived distortion in low-quality images. We show that a combination of these two measures can perform well in predicting subjective ratings of image quality.

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections