An objective method to evaluate exemplar-based inpainted images quality using Jaccard index

Objective evaluation of images is one of the most essential and practical aspects of image inpainting. The existing objective evaluation methods of image inpainting are functional only on an individual basis and do not provide an accurate and useful objective evaluation of inpainted images. Currently, there is no objective measure for evaluating inpainted images. In this study, an objective evaluation method was developed for image inpainting. In the proposed method, first, 100 images were inpainted using an exemplar-based algorithm. Then, the saliency map and its complementary region in the original image were obtained and a new objective measure was proposed for the evaluation of inpainted images based on the saliency map features. To make the assessment more realistic and comparable to human judgments, two terms, namely penalty and compensation, were taken into account. To assess the performance of our proposed objective measure, the inpainted images were also evaluated using a subjective test. The experiments demonstrates that the proposed objective measure correlated with the qualitative opinion in a human observer study. Finally, the objective measure was compared against three other measures, and the results showed that our proposed objective measure performed better than the other evaluation measures.

Automated summary

Objective evaluation of image inpainting is crucial but lacking in current methods. A new objective measure was proposed in this study based on saliency map features, with consideration of penalty and compensation. Experimental results showed that the proposed measure performed better than other evaluation methods and correlated with human subjective judgments.