Progressive Knowledge Transfer Network Based on Human Visual Perception Mechanism for No-Reference Point Cloud Quality Assessment

Point cloud perceptual quality assessment plays a critical role in many applications, including compression and communication. We propose PKT-PCQA, a point-based no-reference point cloud quality assessment deep learning network that emulates the human visual system by using progressive knowledge transfer to convert coarse-grained quality classification knowledge into a fine-grained quality prediction task. PKT-PCQA exploits local and global features, as well as an attention mechanism based on spatial and channel attention modules. Experiments on three large and independent point cloud assessment datasets show that PKT-PCQA outperforms existing no-reference and reduced-reference point cloud quality assessment methods and achieves better or similar performance compared to several state-of-the-art full-reference methods. The code will be available for download at https://github.com/sdqi/PKT-PCQA.