No-reference Quality Evaluation Algorithm for Color Gamut Mapped Images Based on Double-Order Color Information

Gamut mapping is a technology used to achieve high-fidelity transmission of color images between different devices. However, an image obtained through gamut mapping inevitably produces serious artifacts and distortions because of color information loss, which leads to distortions in texture and color naturalness. Since color information loss is serious in gamut mapped images (GMIs), a no-reference quality evaluation method based on double-order color representation is proposed. Many traditional image quality assessment (IQA) methods extract quality-aware features (QAFs) in the gray domain, and a few IQA methods extract QAFs from color components, such as hue and saturation. Hue and saturation were calculated linearly using the R, G, and B color components while ignoring the derivative information of the color. Therefore, this study extracted features from zero-order (R, G, and B components) and first-order (derivative) color information. These features were then used for regression training to obtain a quality prediction model. Experimental results show that the model is superior to existing no-reference quality evaluation methods in predicting the quality of GMIs.