No-Reference Image Quality Assessment by Hallucinating Pristine Features

In this paper, we propose a no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) method via feature level pseudo-reference (PR) hallucination. The proposed quality assessment framework is rooted in the view that the perceptually meaningful features could be well exploited to characterize the visual quality, and the natural image statistical behaviors are exploited in an effort to deliver the accurate predictions. Herein, the PR features from the distorted images are learned by a mutual learning scheme with the pristine reference as the supervision, and the discriminative characteristics of PR features are further ensured with the triplet constraints. Given a distorted image for quality inference, the feature level disentanglement is performed with an invertible neural layer for final quality prediction, leading to the PR and the corresponding distortion features for comparison. The effectiveness of our proposed method is demonstrated on four popular IQA databases, and superior performance on cross-database evaluation also reveals the high generalization capability of our method. The implementation of our method is publicly available on https://github.com/Baoliang93/FPR.