Deep blind image quality assessment by employing FR-IQA

In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA). Though deep learning has yielded superior performance in a number of computer vision studies, applying the deep CNN to the NR-IQA framework is not straightforward, since we face a few critical problems: 1) lack of training data; 2) absence of local ground truth targets. To alleviate these problems, we employ the full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) metrics as intermediate training targets of the CNN. In addition, we incorporate the pooling stage in the training stage, so that the whole parameters of the model can be optimized in an end-to-end framework. The proposed model, named as a blind image evaluator based on a convolutional neural network (BIECON), achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy that is comparable with that of FR-IQA methods.