In this letter, a novel adaptive total variation (ATV) model is proposed for image inpainting. The classical TV model is a partial differential equation (PDE)-based technique. While the TV model can preserve the image edges well, it has some drawbacks, such as staircase effect in the inpainted image and slow convergence rate. By analyzing the diffusion mechanism of TV model and introducing a new edge detection operator named difference curvature, we propose a novel ATV inpainting model. The proposed ATV model can diffuse the image information smoothly and quickly, namely, this model not only eliminates the staircase effect but also accelerates the convergence rate. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Super resolution (SR) image reconstruction has attracted increasing attention these years and many SR image reconstruction algorithms have been proposed for restoring a high-resolution image from one or multiple low-resolution images. However, how to objectively evaluate the quality of SR reconstructed images remains an open problem. Although a great number of image quality metrics have been proposed, they are quite limited to evaluate the quality of SR reconstructed images. Inspired by this, this paper presents a blind quality index for SR reconstructed images using first- and second-order structural degradation. First, the SR reconstructed image is decomposed into multi-order derivative magnitude maps, which are effective for first- and second-order structural representation. Then, log-energy based features are extracted on these multi-order derivative magnitude maps in the frequency domain. Finally, support vector regression is used to learn the quality model for SR reconstructed images. The results of extensive experiments that were conducted on one public database demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over the existing quality metrics. Moreover, the proposed method is less dependent on the number of training images and has low computational cost.

Image retouching is fundamental in photography, which is widely used to improve the perceptual quality of a low-quality image. Traditional image quality metrics are designed for degraded images, so they are limited in evaluating the quality of retouched images. This letter presents a RETouched Image QUality Evaluation (RETIQUE) algorithm by measuring structure and color changes between the original and retouched images. Structure changes are measured by gradient similarity. Color colorfulness and saturation are utilized to measure color changes. The overall quality score of a retouched image is computed as the linear combination of gradient similarity and color similarity. The performance of RETIQUE is evaluated on a public Digitally Retouched Image Quality (DRIQ) database. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed metric outperforms the state-of-the-arts.

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.