Title
Image Quality Assessment Using Contrastive Learning
Abstract
We consider the problem of obtaining image quality representations in a self-supervised manner. We use prediction of distortion type and degree as an auxiliary task to learn features from an unlabeled image dataset containing a mixture of synthetic and realistic distortions. We then train a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) using a contrastive pairwise objective to solve the auxiliary problem. We refer to the proposed training framework and resulting deep IQA model as the CONTRastive Image QUality Evaluator (CONTRIQUE). During evaluation, the CNN weights are frozen and a linear regressor maps the learned representations to quality scores in a No-Reference (NR) setting. We show through extensive experiments that CONTRIQUE achieves competitive performance when compared to state-of-the-art NR image quality models, even without any additional fine-tuning of the CNN backbone. The learned representations are highly robust and generalize well across images afflicted by either synthetic or authentic distortions. Our results suggest that powerful quality representations with perceptual relevance can be obtained without requiring large labeled subjective image quality datasets. The implementations used in this paper are available at https://github.com/pavancm/CONTRIQUE.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TIP.2022.3181496
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Distortion, Task analysis, Image quality, Predictive models, Training, Convolutional neural networks, Computational modeling, No reference image quality assessment, blind image quality assessment, self-supervised learning, deep learning
Journal
31
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1057-7149
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Pavan C. Madhusudana101.35
Neil Birkbeck214116.44
Yilin Wang300.68
Balu Adsumilli4168.19
Alan C. Bovik55062349.55