Subjective and Objective Quality Evaluation of Super-Resolution Enhanced Broadcast Images on a Novel SR-IQA Dataset

Super-Resolution (SR) is essential for displaying low-quality broadcast content on high-resolution screens. Recently, SR methods have been developed that not only increase resolution while preserving the original image information but also enhance the perceived quality. However, evaluating the quality of SR images generated from low-quality sources, such as SR-enhanced broadcast content, is challenging due to the need to consider both distortions and improvements. Additionally, assessing SR image quality without original high-quality sources presents another significant challenge. Unfortunately, there has been a dearth of research specifically addressing the Image Quality Assessment (IQA) of SR images under these conditions. In this work, we introduce a new IQA dataset for SR broadcast images in both 2K and 4K resolutions. We conducted a subjective quality evaluation to obtain Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for these SR images and performed a comprehensive human study to identify key factors influencing perceived quality. Finally, we evaluated the performance of existing IQA metrics on our dataset. This study reveals the limitations of current metrics, highlighting the need for a more robust IQA metric that better correlates with the perceived quality of SR images. The proposed dataset and the subjective evaluation platform are publicly available at https://sites.google.com/hanyang.ac.kr/ivml/datasets/sreb.