Q-DNN: A quality-aware deep neural network for blind assessment of enhanced images

Image enhancement is widely popular due to its capability of producing "better" visual quality for specific applications. Although many enhancement algorithms have been developed in recent years, the studies towards blind assessment of enhanced images are still very lacking. In this paper, we propose a data-driven blind image quality assessment (BIQA) method based on the quality-aware deep neural network (Q-DNN). Unlike the conventional hand-crafted features designed for measuring the degradation level of specific distortion types, a supervised learning model is utilized in our Q-DNN, which is capable of adaptively updating the feature extractor and quality regressor for describing the visual artifacts caused by different image enhancement tasks. Experimental results on two challenging enhanced image databases show that the proposed method is significantly superior to the state-of-the-art BIQA metrics.