1. Collaborative Auto-encoding for Blind Image Quality Assessment
- Author
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Zhou, Zehong, Zhou, Fei, and Qiu, Guoping
- Subjects
FOS: Computer and information sciences ,Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) ,Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) ,FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition ,Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Image and Video Processing - Abstract
Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) is a challenging problem with important real-world applications. Recent efforts attempting to exploit powerful representations by deep neural networks (DNN) are hindered by the lack of subjectively annotated data. This paper presents a novel BIQA method which overcomes this fundamental obstacle. Specifically, we design a pair of collaborative autoencoders (COAE) consisting of a content autoencoder (CAE) and a distortion autoencoder (DAE) that work together to extract content and distortion representations, which are shown to be highly descriptive of image quality. While the CAE follows a standard codec procedure, we introduce the CAE-encoded feature as an extra input to the DAE's decoder for reconstructing distorted images, thus effectively forcing DAE's encoder to extract distortion representations. The self-supervised learning framework allows the COAE including two feature extractors to be trained by almost unlimited amount of data, thus leaving limited samples with annotations to finetune a BIQA model. We will show that the proposed BIQA method achieves state-of-the-art performance and has superior generalization capability over other learning based models. The codes are available at: https://github.com/Macro-Zhou/NRIQA-VISOR/.
- Published
- 2023