A no-reference texture regularity metric based on visual saliency

This paper presents a no-reference perceptual metric that quantifies the degree of perceived regularity in textures. The metric is based on the similarity of visual attention (VA) of the textural primitives and the periodic spatial distribution of foveated fixation regions throughout the image. A ground-truth eye-tracking database for textures is also generated as part of this paper and is used to evaluate the performance of the most popular VA models. Using the saliency map generated by the best VA model, the proposed texture regularity metric is computed. It is shown through subjective testing that the proposed metric has a strong correlation with the mean opinion score for the perceived regularity of textures. The proposed texture regularity metric can be used to improve the quality and performance of many image processing applications like texture synthesis, texture compression, and content-based image retrieval.