Feature rectification and enhancement for no-reference image quality assessment

Abstract

The assessment of image is a critical task in computer vision, particularly in a no-referenced context, which presents numerous challenges. Though Deep neural networks have exhibited excellent performance on no-reference quality assessment (NR-IQA), the distortion-aware NR-IQA methods are limited to specific distortion type and struggle to handle realistic distortion scenarios. In this work, we propose a feature rectification and enhancement convolutional neural network namely FREIQA for NR-IQA. Our approach targets to fully utilize the multi-stage semantic features to produce a well fused and rectified score vector for effective image quality regression. Specifically, the multi-stage semantic features extracted by a pre-trained backbone would be rectified with a multi-level channel attention module before integrating to a global score vector. The fused score vector then will be gradually optimized through the perception feature provided by the multi-stage semantic feature, and finally sent to quality regression network to obtain the image quality score. Experimental results on public benchmarks including LIVE, TID2013, CSIQ, LIVEC, KADID-10k, KonIQ-10k and Waterloo exploration database show that our FREIQA achieve the state-of-the-art performance.