Deep Learning Based Image Quality Assessment: A Survey

Abstract

Image quality assessment (IQA) is the problem of measuring the perceptual quality of images, which is crucial for many image-related applications. It is a difficult task due to the coupling of various degradation and the scarcity of annotations. To facilitate a better understanding of IQA, we survey the recent advances in deep learning based IQA methods, which have demonstrated remarkable performance and innovation in this field. We classify the IQA methods into two main groups: reference-based and reference-free methods. Reference-based methods compare query images with reference images, while reference-free methods do not. We further subdivide reference-based methods into full-reference and reduced-reference methods, depending on the amount of information they need from the reference images, and reference-free methods into single-input, pair-input, and multimodal-input methods, according to the form of input they use. The advantages and limitations of each category are analyzed and some representative examples of state-of-the-art methods are provided. We conclude our paper by highlighting some of the future directions and open challenges in deep learning based IQA.