41,405 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
A Detail Based Method for Linear Full Reference Image Quality Prediction
In this paper, a novel Full Reference method is proposed for image quality
assessment, using the combination of two separate metrics to measure the
perceptually distinct impact of detail losses and of spurious details. To this
purpose, the gradient of the impaired image is locally decomposed as a
predicted version of the original gradient, plus a gradient residual. It is
assumed that the detail attenuation identifies the detail loss, whereas the
gradient residuals describe the spurious details. It turns out that the
perceptual impact of detail losses is roughly linear with the loss of the
positional Fisher information, while the perceptual impact of the spurious
details is roughly proportional to a logarithmic measure of the signal to
residual ratio. The affine combination of these two metrics forms a new index
strongly correlated with the empirical Differential Mean Opinion Score (DMOS)
for a significant class of image impairments, as verified for three independent
popular databases. The method allowed alignment and merging of DMOS data coming
from these different databases to a common DMOS scale by affine
transformations. Unexpectedly, the DMOS scale setting is possible by the
analysis of a single image affected by additive noise.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures. Copyright notice: The paper has been accepted
for publication on the IEEE Trans. on Image Processing on 19/09/2017 and the
copyright has been transferred to the IEE
Exploiting Unlabeled Data in CNNs by Self-supervised Learning to Rank
For many applications the collection of labeled data is expensive laborious.
Exploitation of unlabeled data during training is thus a long pursued objective
of machine learning. Self-supervised learning addresses this by positing an
auxiliary task (different, but related to the supervised task) for which data
is abundantly available. In this paper, we show how ranking can be used as a
proxy task for some regression problems. As another contribution, we propose an
efficient backpropagation technique for Siamese networks which prevents the
redundant computation introduced by the multi-branch network architecture. We
apply our framework to two regression problems: Image Quality Assessment (IQA)
and Crowd Counting. For both we show how to automatically generate ranked image
sets from unlabeled data. Our results show that networks trained to regress to
the ground truth targets for labeled data and to simultaneously learn to rank
unlabeled data obtain significantly better, state-of-the-art results for both
IQA and crowd counting. In addition, we show that measuring network uncertainty
on the self-supervised proxy task is a good measure of informativeness of
unlabeled data. This can be used to drive an algorithm for active learning and
we show that this reduces labeling effort by up to 50%.Comment: Accepted at TPAMI. (Keywords: Learning from rankings, image quality
assessment, crowd counting, active learning). arXiv admin note: text overlap
with arXiv:1803.0309
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