No-Reference Quality Metric of Blocking Artifacts Based on Color Discontinuity Analysis

Abstract

This letter presents a no-reference blocking artifact measure based on analysis of color discontinuities in YUV color space. Color shift and color disappearance are first analyzed in JPEG images. For color-shifting and color-disappearing areas, the blocking artifact scores are obtained by computing the gradient differences across the block boundaries in U component and Y component, respectively. An overall quality score is then produced as the average of the local ones. Extensive simulations and comparisons demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.