No-Reference Image Quality Assessment Leveraging GenAI Images

In recent years, deep learning-based methods have made significant progress on the image quality assessment problem; however, challenges remain arising from the lack of annotated, real-world training data and consequent poor generalization ability. Towards addressing these challenges, we propose a no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) method based on generative AI (GenAI) images. Specifically, we use GenAI images as reference images, employing a cold diffusion model to generate distorted images of four different distortion types, and we label these distorted images using a full-reference model, thereby making it possible to construct a large-scale pre-training dataset. We use this resource generation method to facilitate NR-IQA model building. We deploy a Multi-scale Cross Attention Block (MCAB) and a Scale Simple Attention Module (SSAM) to enhance feature representation by extracting multi-scale feature information from both the channel and spatial dimensions that are predictive of image quality. Extensive experiments on eight public databases demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. A public release of all the codes associated with this work will be made available on GitHub.