An Improvement of Structural Similarity Index for Image Quality Assessment

The image quality assessment has been widely used in image processing. Several researches have been developed and carried considering the Human Visual System (HVS). Under the hypothesis that human visual perception is extremely adapted to retrieve structural information from a scene, the SSIM index is the most widely used in this area, which leads to a better correlation with HVS. Despite its robustness the SSIM presents some limitations in the presence of blur affecting images. In this study, we propose an improved version of the SSIM for blur image assessment. The idea is to combine gradient based SSIM score with that of the structural information of the blur. Experimental results show a good performance.