scholarly journals IE-IQA: Intelligibility Enriched Generalizable No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tianshu Song ◽  
Leida Li ◽  
Hancheng Zhu ◽  
Jiansheng Qian
Keyword(s):  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Selection Strategy ◽  
Reference Image ◽  
Quality Model ◽  
Generalization Ability ◽  
Urgent Task ◽  
Generalization Problem ◽  
In The Wild

Image quality assessment (IQA) for authentic distortions in the wild is challenging. Though current IQA metrics have achieved decent performance for synthetic distortions, they still cannot be satisfactorily applied to realistic distortions because of the generalization problem. Improving generalization ability is an urgent task to make IQA algorithms serviceable in real-world applications, while relevant research is still rare. Fundamentally, image quality is determined by both distortion degree and intelligibility. However, current IQA metrics mostly focus on the distortion aspect and do not fully investigate the intelligibility, which is crucial for achieving robust quality estimation. Motivated by this, this paper presents a new framework for building highly generalizable image quality model by integrating the intelligibility. We first analyze the relation between intelligibility and image quality. Then we propose a bilateral network to integrate the above two aspects of image quality. During the fusion process, feature selection strategy is further devised to avoid negative transfer. The framework not only catches the conventional distortion features but also integrates intelligibility features properly, based on which a highly generalizable no-reference image quality model is achieved. Extensive experiments are conducted based on five intelligibility tasks, and the results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art metrics, and the intelligibility task consistently improves metric performance and generalization ability.

scholarly journals No-Reference Image Quality Assessment with Multi-Scale Orderless Pooling of Deep Features

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (7) ◽  
pp. 112
Author(s):  
Domonkos Varga
Keyword(s):  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Multiple Scales ◽  
Digital Images ◽  
Input Image ◽  
Perceptual Quality ◽  
Reference Image ◽  
Benchmark Datasets ◽  
In The Wild

The goal of no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is to evaluate their perceptual quality of digital images without using the distortion-free, pristine counterparts. NR-IQA is an important part of multimedia signal processing since digital images can undergo a wide variety of distortions during storage, compression, and transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture that extracts deep features from the input image at multiple scales to improve the effectiveness of feature extraction for NR-IQA using convolutional neural networks. Specifically, the proposed method extracts deep activations for local patches at multiple scales and maps them onto perceptual quality scores with the help of trained Gaussian process regressors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the introduced algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods on three large benchmark datasets with authentic distortions (LIVE In the Wild, KonIQ-10k, and SPAQ).

scholarly journals Quality Assessment on Authentically Distorted Images by Expanding Proxy Labels

Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaodi Guan ◽  
Fan Li ◽  
Lijun He
Keyword(s):  
Image Quality ◽  
Visual Perception ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Features ◽  
Quality Score ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Reference Image ◽  
Human Visual Perception ◽  
In The Wild

In this paper, we propose a no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) approach towards authentically distorted images, based on expanding proxy labels. In order to distinguish from the human labels, we define the quality score, which is generated by using a traditional NR-IQA algorithm, as “proxy labels”. “Proxy” means that the objective results are obtained by computer after the extraction and assessment of the image features, instead of human judging. To solve the problem of limited image quality assessment (IQA) dataset size, we adopt a cascading transfer-learning method. First, we obtain large numbers of proxy labels which denote the quality score of authentically distorted images by using a traditional no-reference IQA method. Then the deep network is trained by the proxy labels, in order to learn IQA-related knowledge from the amounts of images with their scores. Ultimately, we use fine-tuning to inherit knowledge represented in the trained network. During the procedure, the mapping relationship fits in with human visual perception closer. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm shows an outstanding performance as compared with the existing algorithms. On the LIVE In the Wild Image Quality Challenge database and KonIQ-10k database (two standard databases for authentically distorted image quality assessment), the algorithm realized good consistency between human visual perception and the predicted quality score of authentically distorted images.

scholarly journals Multi-Pooled Inception Features for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 2186
Author(s):  
Domonkos Varga
Keyword(s):  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Input Image ◽  
Reference Image ◽  
Parameter Study ◽  
Image Size ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Display Technology ◽  
Multi Level

Image quality assessment (IQA) is an important element of a broad spectrum of applications ranging from automatic video streaming to display technology. Furthermore, the measurement of image quality requires a balanced investigation of image content and features. Our proposed approach extracts visual features by attaching global average pooling (GAP) layers to multiple Inception modules of on an ImageNet database pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN). In contrast to previous methods, we do not take patches from the input image. Instead, the input image is treated as a whole and is run through a pretrained CNN body to extract resolution-independent, multi-level deep features. As a consequence, our method can be easily generalized to any input image size and pretrained CNNs. Thus, we present a detailed parameter study with respect to the CNN base architectures and the effectiveness of different deep features. We demonstrate that our best proposal—called MultiGAP-NRIQA—is able to outperform the state-of-the-art on three benchmark IQA databases. Furthermore, these results were also confirmed in a cross database test using the LIVE In the Wild Image Quality Challenge database.

scholarly journals No-Reference Image Quality Assessment with Global Statistical Features

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Domonkos Varga
Keyword(s):  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Assessment Method ◽  
Perceptual Quality ◽  
Reference Image ◽  
Distribution Features ◽  
Quality Assessment Method ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Time Systems

The perceptual quality of digital images is often deteriorated during storage, compression, and transmission. The most reliable way of assessing image quality is to ask people to provide their opinions on a number of test images. However, this is an expensive and time-consuming process which cannot be applied in real-time systems. In this study, a novel no-reference image quality assessment method is proposed. The introduced method uses a set of novel quality-aware features which globally characterizes the statistics of a given test image, such as extended local fractal dimension distribution feature, extended first digit distribution features using different domains, Bilaplacian features, image moments, and a wide variety of perceptual features. Experimental results are demonstrated on five publicly available benchmark image quality assessment databases: CSIQ, MDID, KADID-10k, LIVE In the Wild, and KonIQ-10k.

No-Reference Image Quality Assessment Based on Multi-Order Gradients Statistics

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 10505-1-10505-16
Author(s):  
Yin Zhang ◽  
Xuehan Bai ◽  
Junhua Yan ◽  
Yongqi Xiao ◽  
C. R. Chatwin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Assessment Method ◽  
Image Distortion ◽  
Image Feature ◽  
Reference Image ◽  
Gradient Magnitude ◽  
Distortion Type

Abstract A new blind image quality assessment method called No-Reference Image Quality Assessment Based on Multi-Order Gradients Statistics is proposed, which is aimed at solving the problem that the existing no-reference image quality assessment methods cannot determine the type of image distortion and that the quality evaluation has poor robustness for different types of distortion. In this article, an 18-dimensional image feature vector is constructed from gradient magnitude features, relative gradient orientation features, and relative gradient magnitude features over two scales and three orders on the basis of the relationship between multi-order gradient statistics and the type and degree of image distortion. The feature matrix and distortion types of known distorted images are used to train an AdaBoost_BP neural network to determine the image distortion type; the feature matrix and subjective scores of known distorted images are used to train an AdaBoost_BP neural network to determine the image distortion degree. A series of comparative experiments were carried out using Laboratory of Image and Video Engineering (LIVE), LIVE Multiply Distorted Image Quality, Tampere Image, and Optics Remote Sensing Image databases. Experimental results show that the proposed method has high distortion type judgment accuracy and that the quality score shows good subjective consistency and robustness for all types of distortion. The performance of the proposed method is not constricted to a particular database, and the proposed method has high operational efficiency.

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