AAAI 2023technical74 citations

Data-Efficient Image Quality Assessment with Attention-Panel Decoder

Guanyi Qin, Runze Hu, Yutao Liu, Xiawu Zheng, Haotian Liu, Xiu Li, Yan Zhang

Abstract

Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) is a fundamental task in computer vision, which however remains unresolved due to the complex distortion conditions and diversified image contents. To confront this challenge, we in this paper propose a novel BIQA pipeline based on the Transformer architecture, which achieves an efficient quality-aware feature representation with much fewer data. More specifically, we consider the traditional fine-tuning in BIQA as an interpretation of the pre-trained model. In this way, we further introduce a Transformer decoder to refine the perceptual information of the CLS token from different perspectives. This enables our model to establish the quality-aware feature manifold efficiently while attaining a strong generalization capability. Meanwhile, inspired by the subjective evaluation behaviors of human, we introduce a novel attention panel mechanism, which improves the model performance and reduces the prediction uncertainty simultaneously. The proposed BIQA method maintains a light-weight design with only one layer of the decoder, yet extensive experiments on eight standard BIQA datasets (both synthetic and authentic) demonstrate its superior performance to the state-of-the-art BIQA methods, i.e., achieving the SRCC values of 0.875 (vs. 0.859 in LIVEC) and 0.980 (vs. 0.969 in LIVE). Checkpoints, logs and code will be available at https://github.com/narthchin/DEIQT.

BibTeX
@article{Qin_Hu_Liu_Zheng_Liu_Li_Zhang_2023, title={Data-Efficient Image Quality Assessment with Attention-Panel Decoder}, volume={37}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/25302}, DOI={10.1609/aaai.v37i2.25302}, abstractNote={Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) is a fundamental task in computer vision, which however remains unresolved due to the complex distortion conditions and diversified image contents. To confront this challenge, we in this paper propose a novel BIQA pipeline based on the Transformer architecture, which achieves an efficient quality-aware feature representation with much fewer data. More specifically, we consider the traditional fine-tuning in BIQA as an interpretation of the pre-trained model. In this way, we further introduce a Transformer decoder to refine the perceptual information of the CLS token from different perspectives. This enables our model to establish the quality-aware feature manifold efficiently while attaining a strong generalization capability. Meanwhile, inspired by the subjective evaluation behaviors of human, we introduce a novel attention panel mechanism, which improves the model performance and reduces the prediction uncertainty simultaneously. The proposed BIQA method maintains a light-weight design with only one layer of the decoder, yet extensive experiments on eight standard BIQA datasets (both synthetic and authentic) demonstrate its superior performance to the state-of-the-art BIQA methods, i.e., achieving the SRCC values of 0.875 (vs. 0.859 in LIVEC) and 0.980 (vs. 0.969 in LIVE). Checkpoints, logs and code will be available at https://github.com/narthchin/DEIQT.}, number={2}, journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, author={Qin, Guanyi and Hu, Runze and Liu, Yutao and Zheng, Xiawu and Liu, Haotian and Li, Xiu and Zhang, Yan}, year={2023}, month={Jun.}, pages={2091-2100} }
Data-Efficient Image Quality Assessment with Attention-Panel Decoder · AAAI 2023