Automatically learned quality assessment for images has recently become a hot topic due to its usefulness in a wide variety of applications, such as evaluating image capture pipelines, storage techniques, and sharing media. Despite the subjective nature of this problem, most existing methods only predict the mean opinion score provided by data sets, such as AVA and TID2013. Our approach differs from others in that we predict the distribution of human opinion scores using a convolutional neural network. Our architecture also has the advantage of being significantly simpler than other methods with comparable performance. Our proposed approach relies on the success (and retraining) of proven, state-of-the-art deep object recognition networks. Our resulting network can be used to not only score images reliably and with high correlation to human perception, but also to assist with adaptation and optimization of photo editing enhancement algorithms in a photographic pipeline. All this is done without need for a “golden” reference image, consequently allowing for single-image, semantic- and perceptually-aware, no-reference quality assessment.
In this work we describe a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to accurately predict image quality without a reference image. Taking image patches as input, the CNN works in the spatial domain without using hand-crafted features that are employed by most previous methods. The network consists of one convolutional layer with max and min pooling, two fully connected layers and an output node. Within the network structure, feature learning and regression are integrated into one optimization process, which leads to a more effective model for estimating image quality. This approach achieves state of the art performance on the LIVE dataset and shows excellent generalization ability in cross dataset experiments. Further experiments on images with local distortions demonstrate the local quality estimation ability of our CNN, which is rarely reported in previous literature. General purpose blind image quality assessment (BIQA) has been recently attracting significant attention in the fields of image processing, vision and machine learning. State-of-the-art BIQA methods usually learn to evaluate the image quality by regression from human subjective scores of the training samples. However, these methods need a large number of human scored images for training, and lack an explicit explanation of how the image quality is affected by image local features. An interesting question is then: can we learn for effective BIQA without using human scored images? This paper makes a good effort to answer this question. We partition the distorted images into overlapped patches, and use a percentile pooling strategy to estimate the local quality of each patch. Then a quality-aware clustering (QAC) method is proposed to learn a set of centroids on each quality level. These centroids are then used as a codebook to infer the quality of each patch in a given image, and subsequently a perceptual quality score of the whole image can be obtained. The proposed QAC based BIQA method is simple yet effective. It not only has comparable accuracy to those methods using human scored images in learning, but also has merits such as high linearity to human perception of image quality, real-time implementation and availability of image local quality map.   We trained a large, deep convolutional neural network to classify the 1.2 million high-resolution images in the ImageNet LSVRC-2010 contest into the 1000 different classes. On the test data, we achieved top-1 and top-5 error rates of 37.5 and 17.0 which is considerably better than the previous state-of-the-art. The neural network, which has 60 million parameters and 650,000 neurons, consists of five convolutional layers, some of which are followed by max-pooling layers, and three fully-connected layers with a final 1000-way softmax. To make training faster, we used non-saturating neurons and a very efficient GPU implementation of the convolution operation. To reduce overriding in the fully-connected layers we employed a recently-developed regularization method called "dropout" that proved to be very effective. We also entered a variant of this model in the ILSVRC-2012 competition and achieved a winning top-5 test error rate of 15.3 , compared to 26.2 achieved by the second-best entry.  This paper presents a no reference image (NR) quality assessment (IQA) method based on a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). The CNN takes unpreprocessed image patches as an input and estimates the quality without employing any domain knowledge. By that, features and natural scene statistics are learnt purely data driven and combined with pooling and regression in one framework. We evaluate the network on the LIVE database and achieve a linear Pearson correlation superior to state-of-the-art NR IQA methods. We also apply the network to the image forensics task of decoder-sided quantization parameter estimation and also here achieve correlations of r = 0.989. In this work, we investigate the use of deep learning for distortion-generic blind image quality assessment. We report on different design choices, ranging from the use of features extracted from pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as a generic image description, to the use of features extracted from a CNN fine-tuned for the image quality task. Our best proposal, named DeepBIQ, estimates the image quality by average-pooling the scores predicted on multiple subregions of the original image. Experimental results on the LIVE In the Wild Image Quality Challenge Database show that DeepBIQ outperforms the state-of-the-art methods compared, having a linear correlation coefficient with human subjective scores of almost 0.91. These results are further confirmed also on four benchmark databases of synthetically distorted images: LIVE, CSIQ, TID2008, and TID2013.