A Novel Patch Variance Biased Convolutional Neural Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment
Lai-Man Po, Mengyang Liu, Wilson Y. F. Yuen, Yuming Li, Xuyuan Xu, Chang Sheng Zhou, Peter H. W. Wong, Kin Wai Lau, Hon-Tung Luk · IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology · 2019
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully applied on no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) with respect to human perception. Most of these methods deal with small image patches and use the average score of the test patches for predicting the whole image quality. We discovered that image patches from homogenous regions are unreliable for both neural network training and final image quality score estimation. In addition, image patches with complex structures have much higher chances of achieving better image quality prediction. Based on these findings, we enhanced the conventional CNN-based NR-IQA algorithm to avoid homogenous patches for the network training and quality score estimation. Moreover, we also use a variance-based weighting average to bias the final image quality score to the patches with complex structure. The experimental results show that this simple approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance compared with well-known NR-IQA algorithms.