Exploring Image Quality Assessment from a New Perspective: Pupil Size

TL;DR

This study investigates how pupil size varies during image quality assessment tasks, revealing its potential as a physiological indicator for subjective and objective image quality evaluation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel perspective by linking pupil size to image quality assessment, offering insights for developing new objective and subjective IQA methods.

Findings

Pupil size increases when evaluating image quality.

Pupil size correlates with perceived image quality.

Visual attention mechanisms are activated during IQA.

Abstract

This paper explores how the image quality assessment (IQA) task affects the cognitive processes of people from the perspective of pupil size and studies the relationship between pupil size and image quality. Specifically, we first invited subjects to participate in a subjective experiment, which includes two tasks: free observation and IQA. In the free observation task, subjects did not need to perform any action, and they only needed to observe images as they usually do with an album. In the IQA task, subjects were required to score images according to their overall impression of image quality. Then, by analyzing the difference in pupil size between the two tasks, we find that people may activate the visual attention mechanism when evaluating image quality. Meanwhile, we also find that the change in pupil size is closely related to image quality in the IQA task. For future research on IQA, this research can not only provide a theoretical basis for the objective IQA method and promote the development of more effective objective IQA methods, but also provide a new subjective IQA method for collecting the authentic subjective impression of image quality.