Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment with Transformer and DISTS

Abstract

To improve data transmission efficiency, image compression is a commonly used method with the disadvantage of accompanying image distortion. There are many image restoration (IR) algorithms, and one of the most advanced algorithms is the generative adversarial network (GAN)-based method with a high correlation to the human visual system (HVS). To evaluate the performance of GAN-based IR algorithms, we proposed an ensemble image quality assessment (IQA) called ATDIQA (Auxiliary Transformer with DISTS IQA) to give weights on multiscale features global self-attention transformers and local features of convolutional neural network (CNN) IQA of DISTS. The result not only performed better on the perceptual image processing algorithms (PIPAL) dataset with images by GAN IR algorithms but also has good model generalization over LIVE and TID2013 as traditional distorted image datasets. The ATDIQA ensemble successfully demonstrates its performance with a high correlation with the human judgment score of distorted images.

Keywords

• image quality assessment (IQA)
• full-reference IQA
• deep image structure and texture similarity (DISTS)
• transformer IQA
• PIPAL dataset
• ensemble IQA