Partial-Reference IQA Based on Hermite-Gauss Structural Prediction and Texture Deviation

Abstract

We propose PreSPA (Partial-Reference Structural Prediction Approach), a Partial-Reference Image Quality Assessment framework that decomposes perceptual quality into two complementary indices. A structure-aware index, operating in a No-Reference manner, captures structural degradation through Hermite-Gauss prediction of the distorted gradient field and the angular variance of its curvature. A texture-sensitive index estimates local noise through a scalar prior $μ$, obtained from energy differences between reference and distorted complex gradient maps on strong-edge regions and accumulated over weakly-structured ones, reflecting the perceptual leakage of degraded edges into surrounding textures. Crucially, $μ$ is the only information extracted from the reference and is computed once per image pair, reducing the reference footprint to a single scalar value. The final score is produced by an affine fusion with only three interpretable parameters, making the method compact, transparent, and computationally efficient, with the viewing distance embedded into the operator scale and no dataset-specific calibration. Extensive evaluations on six standard benchmarks show that PreSPA consistently rivals or exceeds leading No-Reference approaches, while in several cases matching the accuracy of Full-Reference models.