Deep Learning in Image Quality Assessment: Past, Present, and What Lies Ahead

Abstract

Quality assessment of images plays an important role in different applications in image processing and computer vision. While subjective quality assessment of images is the most accurate approach due to issues objective quality metrics have been the go to approach. Until recently most such metrics have taken advantage of different handcrafted features. Similar (but with a slower speed) to other applications in image processing and computer vision, different machine learning techniques, more specifically Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been introduced in different tasks related to image quality assessment. In this short paper which is a supplement to a focal talk given with the same title at the London Imaging Meeting (LIM) 2021 we aim to provide a short timeline on how CNNs have been used in the field of image quality assessment so far, how the field could take advantage of CNNs to evaluate the image quality, and what we expect will happen in the near future.