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Register a new userAlgorithm Selection for Image Quality Assessment
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Added by
Dietmar Saupe
Publication date
2019
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Subjective perceptual image quality can be assessed in lab studies by human observers. Objective image quality assessment (IQA) refers to algorithms for estimation of the mean subjective quality ratings. Many such methods have been proposed, both for blind IQA in which no original reference image is available as well as for the full-reference case. We compared 8 state-of-the-art algorithms for blind IQA and showed that an oracle, able to predict the best performing method for any given input image, yields a hybrid method that could outperform even the best single existing method by a large margin. In this contribution we address the research question whether established methods to learn such an oracle can improve blind IQA. We applied AutoFolio, a state-of-the-art system that trains an algorithm selector to choose a well-performing algorithm for a given instance. We also trained deep neural networks to predict the best method. Our results did not give a positive answer, algorithm selection did not yield a significant improvement over the single best method. Looking into the results in depth, we observed that the noise in images may have played a role in why our trained classifiers could not predict the oracle. This motivates the consideration of noisiness in IQA methods, a property that has so far not been observed and that opens up several interesting new research questions and applications.
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The explosive growth of image data facilitates the fast development of image processing and computer vision methods for emerging visual applications, meanwhile introducing novel distortions to the processed images. This poses a grand challenge to existing blind image quality assessment (BIQA) models, failing to continually adapt to such subpopulation shift. Recent work suggests training BIQA methods on the combination of all available human-rated IQA datasets. However, this type of approach is not scalable to a large number of datasets, and is cumbersome to incorporate a newly created dataset as well. In this paper, we formulate continual learning for BIQA, where a model learns continually from a stream of IQA datasets, building on what was learned from previously seen data. We first identify five desiderata in the new setting with a measure to quantify the plasticity-stability trade-off. We then propose a simple yet effective method for learning BIQA models continually. Specifically, based on a shared backbone network, we add a prediction head for a new dataset, and enforce a regularizer to allow all prediction heads to evolve with new data while being resistant to catastrophic forgetting of old data. We compute the quality score by an adaptive weighted summation of estimates from all prediction heads. Extensive experiments demonstrate the promise of the proposed continual learning method in comparison to standard training techniques for BIQA.
In this paper, we propose an image quality transformer (IQT) that successfully applies a transformer architecture to a perceptual full-reference image quality assessment (IQA) task. Perceptual representation becomes more important in image quality assessment. In this context, we extract the perceptual feature representations from each of input images using a convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone. The extracted feature maps are fed into the transformer encoder and decoder in order to compare a reference and distorted images. Following an approach of the transformer-based vision models, we use extra learnable quality embedding and position embedding. The output of the transformer is passed to a prediction head in order to predict a final quality score. The experimental results show that our proposed model has an outstanding performance for the standard IQA datasets. For a large-scale IQA dataset containing output images of generative model, our model also shows the promising results. The proposed IQT was ranked first among 13 participants in the NTIRE 2021 perceptual image quality assessment challenge. Our work will be an opportunity to further expand the approach for the perceptual IQA task.
Ensemble methods are generally regarded to be better than a single model if the base learners are deemed to be accurate and diverse. Here we investigate a semi-supervised ensemble learning strategy to produce generalizable blind image quality assessment models. We train a multi-head convolutional network for quality prediction by maximizing the accuracy of the ensemble (as well as the base learners) on labeled data, and the disagreement (i.e., diversity) among them on unlabeled data, both implemented by the fidelity loss. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the advantages of employing unlabeled data for BIQA, especially in model generalization and failure identification.
In this paper, we consider a type of image quality assessment as a task-specific measurement, which can be used to select images that are more amenable to a given target task, such as image classification or segmentation. We propose to train simultaneously two neural networks for image selection and a target task using reinforcement learning. A controller network learns an image selection policy by maximising an accumulated reward based on the target task performance on the controller-selected validation set, whilst the target task predictor is optimised using the training set. The trained controller is therefore able to reject those images that lead to poor accuracy in the target task. In this work, we show that the controller-predicted image quality can be significantly different from the task-specific image quality labels that are manually defined by humans. Furthermore, we demonstrate that it is possible to learn effective image quality assessment without using a ``clean validation set, thereby avoiding the requirement for human labelling of images with respect to their amenability for the task. Using $6712$, labelled and segmented, clinical ultrasound images from $259$ patients, experimental results on holdout data show that the proposed image quality assessment achieved a mean classification accuracy of $0.94pm0.01$ and a mean segmentation Dice of $0.89pm0.02$, by discarding $5%$ and $15%$ of the acquired images, respectively. The significantly improved performance was observed for both tested tasks, compared with the respective $0.90pm0.01$ and $0.82pm0.02$ from networks without considering task amenability. This enables image quality feedback during real-time ultrasound acquisition among many other medical imaging applications.
Inspired by the free-energy brain theory, which implies that human visual system (HVS) tends to reduce uncertainty and restore perceptual details upon seeing a distorted image, we propose restorative adversarial net (RAN), a GAN-based model for no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA). RAN, which mimics the process of HVS, consists of three components: a restorator, a discriminator and an evaluator. The restorator restores and reconstructs input distorted image patches, while the discriminator distinguishes the reconstructed patches from the pristine distortion-free patches. After restoration, we observe that the perceptual distance between the restored and the distorted patches is monotonic with respect to the distortion level. We further define Gain of Restoration (GoR) based on this phenomenon. The evaluator predicts perceptual score by extracting feature representations from the distorted and restored patches to measure GoR. Eventually, the quality score of an input image is estimated by weighted sum of the patch scores. Experimental results on Waterloo Exploration, LIVE and TID2013 show the effectiveness and generalization ability of RAN compared to the state-of-the-art NR-IQA models.
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