Degradation Aware Multi-Scale Approach to No Reference Image Quality Assessment

Siddharth Roheda, Amit Satish Unde, Loay Rashid, Abhishek Ameta

Abstract: With the advent of smartphones and social media, images have become a popular medium for sharing information. As a result understanding the perceived quality of images has gained importance. In the recent years No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) has gained prominence due to the abundance of User Generated Content (UGC) being consumed. Applications ranging from photo capture assistance, suggestion of best images for sharing, creation of stories from user media gallery, and enhancement of images for best user experience require NR-IQA. This paper presents a novel Degradation Aware Multi-Scale NR-IQA technique that leverages the multi-scale nature of feature extraction in the Human Visual System (HVS) and also aims at understanding the perceived quality of images across various distortions. This is achieved via learning of two auxiliary tasks: (i) Identification of distortions present in images; (ii) Learning to rank images across distortions. Additionally, a unique data generation strategy is introduced to generate realistic distortions for learning cross-distortion ranking of image quality. The proposed approach achieves State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) performance on multiple IQA datasets and demonstrates generalization in cross-dataset testing. The results showcase the efficacy of the proposed method in identifying and ranking the quality of images across various distortions, making it a promising approach for NR-IQA in real-world applications.