39,880 research outputs found
Blind Quality Assessment for in-the-Wild Images via Hierarchical Feature Fusion and Iterative Mixed Database Training
Image quality assessment (IQA) is very important for both end-users and
service-providers since a high-quality image can significantly improve the
user's quality of experience (QoE) and also benefit lots of computer vision
algorithms. Most existing blind image quality assessment (BIQA) models were
developed for synthetically distorted images, however, they perform poorly on
in-the-wild images, which are widely existed in various practical applications.
In this paper, we propose a novel BIQA model for in-the-wild images by
addressing two critical problems in this field: how to learn better
quality-aware feature representation, and how to solve the problem of
insufficient training samples in terms of their content and distortion
diversity. Considering that perceptual visual quality is affected by both
low-level visual features (e.g. distortions) and high-level semantic
information (e.g. content), we first propose a staircase structure to
hierarchically integrate the features from intermediate layers into the final
feature representation, which enables the model to make full use of visual
information from low-level to high-level. Then an iterative mixed database
training (IMDT) strategy is proposed to train the BIQA model on multiple
databases simultaneously, so the model can benefit from the increase in both
training samples and image content and distortion diversity and can learn a
more general feature representation. Experimental results show that the
proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art BIQA models on six
in-the-wild IQA databases by a large margin. Moreover, the proposed model shows
an excellent performance in the cross-database evaluation experiments, which
further demonstrates that the learned feature representation is robust to
images with diverse distortions and content. The code will be released publicly
for reproducible research
The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff
Image restoration algorithms are typically evaluated by some distortion
measure (e.g. PSNR, SSIM, IFC, VIF) or by human opinion scores that quantify
perceived perceptual quality. In this paper, we prove mathematically that
distortion and perceptual quality are at odds with each other. Specifically, we
study the optimal probability for correctly discriminating the outputs of an
image restoration algorithm from real images. We show that as the mean
distortion decreases, this probability must increase (indicating worse
perceptual quality). As opposed to the common belief, this result holds true
for any distortion measure, and is not only a problem of the PSNR or SSIM
criteria. We also show that generative-adversarial-nets (GANs) provide a
principled way to approach the perception-distortion bound. This constitutes
theoretical support to their observed success in low-level vision tasks. Based
on our analysis, we propose a new methodology for evaluating image restoration
methods, and use it to perform an extensive comparison between recent
super-resolution algorithms.Comment: CVPR 2018 (long oral presentation), see talk at:
https://youtu.be/_aXbGqdEkjk?t=39m43
- …