A reduced-reference quality assessment scheme for blurred images
In this paper, we propose a reduced-reference scheme for evaluating the quality of blurred images under the theory of free-energy principle. Specifically, the free-energy principle indicates that the brain tries to account for the input image with an internal generative model and the discrepancy between the image and its model-explained version, which can be measured by free energy, is related to the image's perceptual quality. Accordingly, we define a visual distance between the blurred image and its original image in free energy to evaluate the quality of the blurred image. Therefore, the proposed quality scheme belongs to reduced-reference methods, which needs some information from the original image for quality assessment. Experimental results on public databases, LIVE, TID2013 and C-SIQ, demonstrate the proposed method works in high consistency with subjective assessment results and outperforms representative image quality assessment approaches.