Contrast distortion is a common distortion type in the image applications. However, there are still very limited approaches proposed for quantifying the quality of the contrast-distorted images reliably. In this paper, we devise a novel no-reference/blind quality assessment method for those contrast-distorted images. In the proposed method, we characterize the image quality by deeply investigating multiple contrast distortion-relevant properties of the image, i.e., spatial characteristics,

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... histogram, visual perception characteristics and chrominance, which can describe the image quality more comprehensively and precisely. Accordingly, a series of quality-aware features are developed to characterize the contrast-distorted image quality properly. Support vector regression (SVR) is then employed to integrate all the extracted features and infer the image quality score. Extensive experiments conducted on the standard contrast-distorted image databases/datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior prediction performance to the state-of-the-art NR quality assessment models on evaluating the contrast-distorted image quality. INDEX TERMS Image quality assessment, no-reference/blind, contrast distortion, free-energy theory, natural scene statistics (NSS).