28,023 research outputs found
Deep Neural Networks for No-Reference and Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment
We present a deep neural network-based approach to image quality assessment
(IQA). The network is trained end-to-end and comprises ten convolutional layers
and five pooling layers for feature extraction, and two fully connected layers
for regression, which makes it significantly deeper than related IQA models.
Unique features of the proposed architecture are that: 1) with slight
adaptations it can be used in a no-reference (NR) as well as in a
full-reference (FR) IQA setting and 2) it allows for joint learning of local
quality and local weights, i.e., relative importance of local quality to the
global quality estimate, in an unified framework. Our approach is purely
data-driven and does not rely on hand-crafted features or other types of prior
domain knowledge about the human visual system or image statistics. We evaluate
the proposed approach on the LIVE, CISQ, and TID2013 databases as well as the
LIVE In the wild image quality challenge database and show superior performance
to state-of-the-art NR and FR IQA methods. Finally, cross-database evaluation
shows a high ability to generalize between different databases, indicating a
high robustness of the learned features
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual
similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite
complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as
PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many
nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found
that features of the VGG network trained on ImageNet classification has been
remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual
are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their
success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new dataset of human
perceptual similarity judgments. We systematically evaluate deep features
across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics.
We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by large margins on
our dataset. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to
ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures
and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised).
Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared
across deep visual representations.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2018; Code and data available at
https://www.github.com/richzhang/PerceptualSimilarit
How is Gaze Influenced by Image Transformations? Dataset and Model
Data size is the bottleneck for developing deep saliency models, because
collecting eye-movement data is very time consuming and expensive. Most of
current studies on human attention and saliency modeling have used high quality
stereotype stimuli. In real world, however, captured images undergo various
types of transformations. Can we use these transformations to augment existing
saliency datasets? Here, we first create a novel saliency dataset including
fixations of 10 observers over 1900 images degraded by 19 types of
transformations. Second, by analyzing eye movements, we find that observers
look at different locations over transformed versus original images. Third, we
utilize the new data over transformed images, called data augmentation
transformation (DAT), to train deep saliency models. We find that label
preserving DATs with negligible impact on human gaze boost saliency prediction,
whereas some other DATs that severely impact human gaze degrade the
performance. These label preserving valid augmentation transformations provide
a solution to enlarge existing saliency datasets. Finally, we introduce a novel
saliency model based on generative adversarial network (dubbed GazeGAN). A
modified UNet is proposed as the generator of the GazeGAN, which combines
classic skip connections with a novel center-surround connection (CSC), in
order to leverage multi level features. We also propose a histogram loss based
on Alternative Chi Square Distance (ACS HistLoss) to refine the saliency map in
terms of luminance distribution. Extensive experiments and comparisons over 3
datasets indicate that GazeGAN achieves the best performance in terms of
popular saliency evaluation metrics, and is more robust to various
perturbations. Our code and data are available at:
https://github.com/CZHQuality/Sal-CFS-GAN
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