No-Reference Image Quality Assessment based on Quality Awareness Feature and Multi-task Training

The existing image quality assessment (IQA) datasets have a small number of samples. Some methods based on transfer learning or data augmentation cannot make good use of image quality-related features. A No Reference (NR)-IQA method based on multi-task training and quality awareness is proposed. First, single or multiple distortion types and levels are imposed on the original image, and different strategies are used to augment different types of distortion datasets. With the idea of weak supervision, we use the Full Reference (FR)-IQA methods to obtain the pseudo-score label of the generated image. Then, we combine the classification information of the distortion type, level, and the information of the image quality score. The ResNet50 network is trained in the pre-train stage on the augmented dataset to obtain more quality-aware pre-training weights. Finally, the fine-tuning stage training is performed on the target IQA dataset using the quality-aware weights to predicate the final prediction score. Various experiments designed on the synthetic distortions and authentic distortions datasets (LIVE, CSIQ, TID2013, LIVEC, KonIQ-10K) prove that the proposed method can utilize the image quality-related features better than the method using only single-task training. The extracted quality-aware features improve the accuracy of the model.