A No-Reference Error-Tolerability Test Methodology for Image Processing Applications

Error-tolerance is a notion that can extend the lifetime of a system, especially for multimedia applications. In this paper we present a no-reference error-tolerability test methodology for image processing applications. No reference images are needed in this methodology for comparison with the images under test. As a result, the hardware that is usually needed in conventional on-line test methods for generating reference data can be totally eliminated. This greatly facilitates developing online error-tolerability test procedures for reliability concerns. Compared with the previous error-tolerability test work in the literature, this work is the first one that can test error-tolerability of images by using a no-reference manner. In this work we develop a particular attribute and the corresponding acquiring method that can effectively quantify acceptability of errors. In particular, the proposed methodology can be adaptively re-configured according to the characteristics of the target image so as to achieve high test accuracy. We also employ 126,894 images to generally evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed test methodology. The experimental results show that up to 93.39% test accuracy is achieved on average by the proposed methodology.