A Pre-Saliency Map Based Blind Image Quality Assessment via Convolutional Neural Networks

In recent years, various approaches have been investigated towards blind image quality assessment (IQA) with high accuracy and low complexity. In this paper we develop a pre-saliency map based blind IQA method, which takes advantage of saliency information in prior of quality prediction for performance enhancement by two steps. 1) We split the image into patches and design a convolution neural network (CNN) to predict the patch-wise quality score. Then we explore the relation between image saliency information and CNN prediction error to present a statistical analysis. 2) Based on the analysis, we propose a patch quality aggregation algorithm by removing non-salient patches which are likely to bring large prediction error and assigning large weights for salient patches. Experimental results validate that our method can achieve high accuracy (0.978) with subjective quality scores, which outperforms existing IQA methods. Meanwhile, the proposed method can reduce 52.7% computational time than the IQA without pre-saliency map.