Visual (image, video) quality assessments can be modelled by visual features in different domains, e.g., spatial, frequency, and temporal domains. Perceptual mechanisms in the human visual system (HVS) play a crucial role in generation of quality perception. This paper proposes a general framework for no-reference visual quality assessment using efficient windowed transformer architectures. A lightweight module for multi-stage channel attention is integrated into Swin (shifted window) Transformer. Such module can represent appropriate perceptual mechanisms in image quality assessment (IQA) to build an accurate IQA model. Meanwhile, representative features for image quality perception in the spatial and frequency domains can also be derived from the IQA model, which are then fed into another windowed transformer architecture for video quality assessment (VQA). The VQA model efficiently reuses attention information across local windows to tackle the issue of expensive time and memory complexities of original transformer. Experimental results on both large-scale IQA and VQA databases demonstrate that the proposed quality assessment models outperform other state-of-the-art models by large margins. The complete source code will be published on Github.
In this paper, we propose an image quality transformer (IQT) that successfully applies a transformer architecture to a perceptual full-reference image quality assessment (IQA) task. Perceptual representation becomes more important in image quality assessment. In this context, we extract the perceptual feature representations from each of input images using a convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone. The extracted feature maps are fed into the transformer encoder and decoder in order to compare a reference and distorted images. Following an approach of the transformer-based vision models, we…
NORCE Norwegian Research Centre（挪威研究中心）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）
Transformer has become the new standard method in natural language processing (NLP), and it also attracts research interests in computer vision area. In this paper we investigate the application of Transformer in Image Quality (TRIQ) assessment. Following the original Transformer encoder employed in Vision Transformer (ViT), we propose an architecture of using a shallow Transformer encoder on the top of a feature map extracted by convolution neural networks (CNN). Adaptive positional embedding is employed in the Transformer encoder to handle images with arbitrary resolutions. Different setting…
With the increase in multimedia content, the type of distortions associated with multimedia is also increasing. This problem of image quality assessment is expanded well in the PIPAL dataset, which is still an open problem to solve for researchers. Although, recently proposed transformers networks have already been used in the literature for image quality assessment. At the same time, we notice that multi-scale feature extraction has proven to be a promising approach for image quality assessment. However, the way transformer networks are used for image quality assessment until now lacks these …
Omnidirectional images, aka 360 images, can deliver immersive and interactive visual experiences. As their popularity has increased dramatically in recent years, evaluating the quality of 360 images has become a problem of interest since it provides insights for capturing, transmitting, and consuming this new media. However, directly adapting quality assessment methods proposed for standard natural images for omnidirectional data poses certain challenges. These models need to deal with very high-resolution data and implicit distortions due to the spherical form of the images. In this study, we…
Objective image quality evaluation is a challenging task, which aims to measure the quality of a given image automatically. According to the availability of the reference images, there are Full-Reference and No-Reference IQA tasks, respectively. Most deep learning approaches use regression from deep features extracted by Convolutional Neural Networks. For the FR task, another option is conducting a statistical comparison on deep features. For all these methods, non-local information is usually neglected. In addition, the relationship between FR and NR tasks is less explored. Motivated by the r…
Bosch Center for AI（博世人工智能中心）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
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…
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）
This paper proposes a biologically-inspired low-level spatiochromatic-model-based similarity method (BLeSS) to assist full-reference image-quality estimators that originally oversimplify color perception processes. More specifically, the spatiochromatic model is based on spatial frequency, spatial orientation, and surround contrast effects. The assistant similarity method is used to complement image-quality estimators based on phase congruency, gradient magnitude, and spectral residual. The effectiveness of BLeSS is validated using FSIM, FSIMc and SR-SIM methods on LIVE, Multiply Distorted LIV…
Isfahan University of Technology（伊斯法罕理工大学）；McMaster University（麦克马斯特大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
The use of 3D and stereo imaging is rapidly increasing. Compression, transmission, and processing could degrade the quality of stereo images. Quality assessment of such images is different than their 2D counterparts. Metrics that represent 3D perception by human visual system (HVS) are expected to assess stereoscopic quality more accurately. In this paper, inspired by brain sensory/motor fusion process, two stereo images are fused together. Then from every fused image two synthesized images are extracted. Effects of different distortions on statistical distributions of the synthesized images a…
Centre for Intelligent Machines, McGill University（麦吉尔大学智能机器中心）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
Following the major successes of self-attention and Transformers for image analysis, we investigate the use of such attention mechanisms in the context of Image Quality Assessment (IQA) and propose a novel full-reference IQA method, Vision Transformer for Attention Modulated Image Quality (VTAMIQ). Our method achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance on the existing IQA datasets and significantly outperforms previous metrics in cross-database evaluations. Most patch-wise IQA methods treat each patch independently; this partially discards global information and limits the ability to …
Measuring the perceptual quality of images automatically is an essential task in the area of computer vision, as degradations on image quality can exist in many processes from image acquisition, transmission to enhancing. Many Image Quality Assessment(IQA) algorithms have been designed to tackle this problem. However, it still remains un settled due to the various types of image distortions and the lack of large-scale human-rated datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm based on the Swin Transformer [31] with fused features from multiple stages, which aggregates information from b…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；The First Affiliated Hospital of Dalian Medical University（大连医科大学附属第一医院）
Coronary CT Angiography (CCTA) is susceptible to various distortions (e.g., artifacts and noise), which severely compromise the exact diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. The appropriate CCTA Vessel-level Image Quality Assessment (CCTA VIQA) algorithm can be used to reduce the risk of error diagnosis. The primary challenges of CCTA VIQA are that the local part of coronary that determines final quality is hard to locate. To tackle the challenge, we formulate CCTA VIQA as a multiple-instance learning (MIL) problem, and exploit Transformer-based MIL backbone (termed as T-MIL) to aggregate the mu…
Exploring Frequency-Inspired Optimization in Transformer for Efficient Single Image Super-Resolution
School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学信息与通信工程学院）；College of Computer Science, Nankai University（南开大学计算机学院）
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Deep learning based image quality assessment (IQA) models usually learn to predict image quality from a single dataset, leading the model to overfit specific scenes. To account for this, mixed datasets training can be an effective way to enhance the generalization capability of the model. However, it is nontrivial to combine different IQA datasets, as their quality evaluation criteria, score ranges, view conditions, as well as subjects are usually not shared during the image quality annotation. In this paper, instead of aligning the annotations, we propose a monotonic neural network for IQA mo…
A TRPCA-Inspired Deep Unfolding Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising via Thresholded t-SVD and Top-K Sparse Transformer
College of Computer Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology（计算机科学与工程学院，山东科技大学）；Gosci Information Technology Co.,Ltd.（Gosci信息技术有限公司）
Causal Disentanglement-Inspired Degradation Representation Learning for Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment
School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University（计算机与人工智能学院，西南交通大学）；School of Transportation and Logistics, Southwest Jiaotong University（交通运输与物流学院，西南交通大学）；School of Physics, Northeast Normal University（物理学院，东北师范大学）；School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（计算机与人工智能学院，江西财经大学）；School of Information Management, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（信息管理学院，江西财经大学）
ClinReadNet: A clinical reading-inspired network for low-dose abdominal CT image quality assessment
School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Nanchang University（南昌大学数学与计算机科学学院）；School of Information Engineering, Nanchang University（南昌大学信息工程学院）；Department of Radiology, Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山纪念医院放射科，中山大学）；Department of Stomatology, Zhujiang Hospital, Southern Medical University（南方医科大学珠江医院口腔科）；Department of Biological Sciences, School of Science, Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University（西安交通大学利物浦大学科学学院生物科学系）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Istanbul Technical University（伊斯坦布尔技术大学）；Mehmet Akif Ersoy Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery Training and Research Hospital（穆罕默德·阿基夫·埃尔索伊胸心血管外科培训研究医院）；Acibadem University（阿哲巴登大学）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
To maintain a standard in a medical imaging study, images should have necessary image quality for potential diagnostic use. Although CNN-based approaches are used to assess the image quality, their performance can still be improved in terms of accuracy. In this work, we approach this problem by using Swin Transformer, which improves the poor-quality image classification performance that causes the degradation in medical image quality. We test our approach on Foreign Object Classification problem on Chest X-Rays (Object-CXR) and Left Ventricular Outflow Tract Classification problem on Cardiac M…
Accurate and fine-grained information about the extent of damage to buildings is essential for humanitarian relief and disaster response. However, as the most commonly used architecture in remote sensing interpretation tasks, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have limited ability to model the non-local relationship between pixels. Recently, Transformer architecture first proposed for modeling long-range dependency in natural language processing has shown promising results in computer vision tasks. Considering the frontier advances of Transformer architecture in the computer vision field, in…
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Purdue University（普渡大学）
Image restoration algorithms for atmospheric turbulence are known to be much more challenging to design than traditional ones such as blur or noise because the distortion caused by the turbulence is an entanglement of spatially varying blur, geometric distortion, and sensor noise. Existing CNN-based restoration methods built upon convolutional kernels with static weights are insufficient to handle the spatially dynamical atmospheric turbulence effect. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a physics-inspired transformer model for imaging through atmospheric turbulence. The proposed…
To study the visual attentional behavior of Human Visual System (HVS) on 3D content, eye tracking experiments are performed and Visual Attention Models (VAMs) are designed. One of the main applications of these VAMs is in quality assessment of 3D video. The usage of 2D VAMs in designing 2D quality metrics is already well explored. This paper investigates the added value of incorporating 3D VAMs into Full-Reference (FR) and No-Reference (NR) quality assessment metrics for stereoscopic 3D video. To this end, state-of-the-art 3D VAMs are integrated to quality assessment pipeline of various existi…
As the immersive multimedia techniques like Free-viewpoint TV (FTV) develop at an astonishing rate, user's demand for high-quality immersive contents increases dramatically. Unlike traditional uniform artifacts, the distortions within immersive contents could be non-uniform structure-related and thus are challenging for commonly used quality metrics. Recent studies have demonstrated that the representation of visual features can be extracted from multiple levels of the hierarchy. Inspired by the hierarchical representation mechanism in the human visual system (HVS), in this paper, we explore t…
CB-HVTNet: A channel-boosted hybrid vision transformer network for lymphocyte assessment in histopathological images
Pakistan Institute of Engineering & Applied Sciences（巴基斯坦工程与应用科学学院）；Air University（空军大学）；Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS（马来西亚国油科技大学）；Korea National University of Transportation（韩国交通大学）
Multiclass Post-Earthquake Building Assessment Integrating High-Resolution Optical and SAR Satellite Imagery, Ground Motion, and Soil Data with Transformers
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Houston, TX, USA（土木与环境工程系，德克萨斯大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, TX, USA（电气与计算机工程系，德克萨斯大学）；Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science, University of Houston, TX, USA（地球与大气科学系，德克萨斯大学）；German Aerospace Center (DLR), Microwaves and Radar Institute, Munich, Germany（德国航天中心（DLR）微波与雷达研究所）
