The goal of No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) is to estimate the perceptual image quality in accordance with subjective evaluations, it is a complex and unsolved problem due to the absence of the pristine reference image. In this paper, we propose a novel model to address the NR-IQA task by leveraging a hybrid approach that benefits from Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and self-attention mechanism in Transformers to extract both local and non-local features from the input image. We capture local structure information of the image via CNNs, then to circumvent the locality bias among the extracted CNNs features and obtain a non-local representation of the image, we utilize Transformers on the extracted features where we model them as a sequential input to the Transformer model. Furthermore, to improve the monotonicity correlation between the subjective and objective scores, we utilize the relative distance information among the images within each batch and enforce the relative ranking among them. Last but not least, we observe that the performance of NR-IQA models degrades when we apply equivariant transformations (e.g. horizontal flipping) to the inputs. Therefore, we propose a method that leverages self-consistency as a source of self-supervision to improve the robustness of NRIQA models. Specifically, we enforce self-consistency between the outputs of our quality assessment model for each image and its transformation (horizontally flipped) to utilize the rich self-supervisory information and reduce the uncertainty of the model. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our work, we evaluate it on seven standard IQA datasets (both synthetic and authentic) and show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on various datasets.
Guangzhou University（广州大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
No-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) has received increasing attention in the IQA community since reference image is not always available. Real-world images generally suffer from various types of distortion. Unfortunately, existing NR-IQA methods do not work with all types of distortion. It is a challenging task to develop universal NR-IQA that has the ability of evaluating all types of distorted images. In this paper, we propose a universal NR-IQA method based on controllable list-wise ranking (CLRIQA). First, to extend the authentically distorted image dataset, we present an imagin…
McMaster University（麦克马斯特大学）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）
Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) that leverage the adversarial training framework for image restoration and enhancement have significantly improved the processed images' sharpness. Surprisingly, although these DCNNs produced crispier images than other methods visually, they may get a lower quality score when popular measures are employed for evaluating them. Therefore it is necessary to develop a quantitative metric to reflect their performances, which is well-aligned with the perceived quality of an image. Famous quantitative metrics such as Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR…
Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学）
We propose a no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) approach that learns from rankings (RankIQA). To address the problem of limited IQA dataset size, we train a Siamese Network to rank images in terms of image quality by using synthetically generated distortions for which relative image quality is known. These ranked image sets can be automatically generated without laborious human labeling. We then use fine-tuning to transfer the knowledge represented in the trained Siamese Network to a traditional CNN that estimates absolute image quality from single images. We demonstrate how our ap…
Attention Down-Sampling Transformer, Relative Ranking and Self-Consistency for Blind Image Quality Assessment
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals（法赫德国王石油与矿业大学）；SDAIA-KFUPM Joint Research Center for Artificial Intelligence（沙特数据与人工智能局-法赫德国王石油与矿业大学人工智能联合研究中心）
MIT（麻省理工学院）；Boston Children’s Hospital（波士顿儿童医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
Fetal brain MRI is useful for diagnosing brain abnormalities but is challenged by fetal motion. The current protocol for T2-weighted fetal brain MRI is not robust to motion so image volumes are degraded by inter- and intra- slice motion artifacts. Besides, manual annotation for fetal MR image quality assessment are usually time-consuming. Therefore, in this work, a semi-supervised deep learning method that detects slices with artifacts during the brain volume scan is proposed. Our method is based on the mean teacher model, where we not only enforce consistency between student and teacher model…
Zhengzhou University（郑州大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Personalized image aesthetic assessment (PIAA) has recently become a hot topic due to its usefulness in a wide variety of applications such as photography, film and television, e-commerce, fashion design and so on. This task is more seriously affected by subjective factors and samples provided by users. In order to acquire precise personalized aesthetic distribution by small amount of samples, we propose a novel user-guided personalized image aesthetic assessment framework. This framework leverages user interactions to retouch and rank images for aesthetic assessment based on deep reinforcemen…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学）
Light field image quality assessment (LFI-QA) is a significant and challenging research problem. It helps to better guide light field acquisition, processing and applications. However, only a few objective models have been proposed and none of them completely consider intrinsic factors affecting the LFI quality. In this paper, we propose a No-Reference Light Field image Quality Assessment (NR-LFQA) scheme, where the main idea is to quantify the LFI quality degradation through evaluating the spatial quality and angular consistency. We first measure the spatial quality deterioration by capturing…
GMC-IQA: Exploiting Global-correlation and Mean-opinion Consistency for No-reference Image Quality Assessment
State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学信息科学与技术学院）；Shenzhen Heytap Technology Corp., Ltd.（深圳嘿哟科技有限公司）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Nanchang Hangkong University（南昌航空大学）
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
To improve the quality of underwater images, various kinds of underwater image enhancement (UIE) operators have been proposed during the past few years. However, the lack of effective objective evaluation methods limits the further development of UIE techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel rank learning guided no-reference quality assessment method for UIE. Our approach, termed Twice Mixing, is motivated by the observation that a mid-quality image can be generated by mixing a high-quality image with its low-quality version. Typical mixup algorithms linearly interpolate a given pair of in…
CLAIM - Charité Lab for AI in Medicine, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin（柏林夏里特医学院人工智能医学实验室）；Research Studio Data Science, Research Studios Austria（奥地利研究工作室数据科学研究工作室）；Centre for Stroke Research Berlin, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin（柏林夏里特医学院柏林卒中研究中心）；Department of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences（马克斯·普朗克人类认知与脑科学研究所神经病学系）；School of Computing and Digital Technology, Faculty of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment, Birmingham City University（伯明翰城市大学计算、工程与建筑环境学院计算与数字技术系）；Mind, Brain, Body Institute, Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität Berlin（柏林洪堡大学柏林心智与脑学院心智、脑与身体研究所）
Average Hausdorff Distance (AVD) is a widely used performance measure to calculate the distance between two point sets. In medical image segmentation, AVD is used to compare ground truth images with segmentation results allowing their ranking. We identified, however, a ranking bias of AVD making it less suitable for segmentation ranking. To mitigate this bias, we present a modified calculation of AVD that we have coined balanced AVD (bAVD). To simulate segmentations for ranking, we manually created non-overlapping segmentation errors common in cerebral vessel segmentation as our use-case. Addi…
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)（挪威科技大学）
Laparoscopic images and videos are often affected by different types of distortion like noise, smoke, blur and nonuniform illumination. Automatic detection of these distortions, followed generally by application of appropriate image quality enhancement methods, is critical to avoid errors during surgery. In this context, a crucial step involves an objective assessment of the image quality, which is a two-fold problem requiring both the classification of the distortion type affecting the image and the estimation of the severity level of that distortion. Unlike existing image quality measures wh…
LRMR: LLM-Driven Relational Multi-node Ranking for Lymph Node Metastasis Assessment in Rectal Cancer
Shanxi Province Cancer Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences（山西省肿瘤医院、中国医学科学院）；Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（苏州生物医学工程与技术研究所、中国科学院）
RankByGene: Gene-Guided Histopathology Representation Learning Through Cross-Modal Ranking Consistency
Stony Brook University（石英溪大学）；Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School（阿提诺拉A.马丁努斯生物医学影像中心，麻省总医院和哈佛医学院）；Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University（生物医学数据科学系，斯坦福大学）；Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, Columbia University（病理学与细胞生物学系，哥伦比亚大学）
Institute for Medical Imaging Technology, School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学医学院生物医学工程学院医学影像技术研究所）；Shanghai United Imaging Intelligence Co., Ltd.（上海联影智能科技有限公司）；Department of Imaging, Tongren Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院附属同仁医院影像科）
Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is one of the most common musculoskeletal disorders and requires early-stage diagnosis. Nowadays, the deep convolutional neural networks have achieved greatly in the computer-aided diagnosis field. However, the construction of the deep learning models usually requires great amounts of annotated data, which is generally high-cost. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for knee cartilage defects assessment, including severity classification and lesion localization. This can be treated as a subtask of knee OA diagnosis. Particularly, we design a self-ensembling frame…
Intra-voxel incoherent motion (IVIM) analysis of fetal lungs Diffusion-Weighted MRI (DWI) data shows potential in providing quantitative imaging bio-markers that reflect, indirectly, diffusion and pseudo-diffusion for non-invasive fetal lung maturation assessment. However, long acquisition times, due to the large number of different ``b-value'' images required for IVIM analysis, precluded clinical feasibility. We introduce SUPER-IVIM-DC a deep-neural-networks (DNN) approach which couples supervised loss with a data-consistency term to enable IVIM analysis of DWI data acquired with a limited nu…
Light field image quality assessment (LF-IQA) plays a significant role due to its guidance to Light Field (LF) contents acquisition, processing and application. The LF can be represented as 4-D signal, and its quality depends on both angular consistency and spatial quality. However, few existing LF-IQA methods concentrate on effects caused by angular inconsistency. Especially, no-reference methods lack effective utilization of 2-D angular information. In this paper, we focus on measuring the 2-D angular consistency for LF-IQA. The Micro-Lens Image (MLI) refers to the angular domain of the LF i…
