Toward Top-Down Stereo Image Quality Assessment via Stereo Attention

Stereo image quality assessment (SIQA) plays a crucial role in evaluating and improving the visual experience of 3D content. Existing visual properties-based methods for the SIQA have achieved promising performance. However, these approaches either ignore the top-down philosophy or make limited attempts, leading to a lack of a comprehensive grasp of the human visual system (HVS) and the SIQA. This article presents a novel stereo attention network (SATNet), which employs a top-down perspective to guide the quality assessment process. Specifically, our generalized stereo attention (SAT) structure adapts components and input/output for stereo scenarios. It leverages the fusion-generated attention map as a higher-level binocular modulator to influence two lower-level monocular features, allowing progressive recalibration of both throughout the pipeline. Additionally, we introduce an energy coefficient (EC) to flexibly tune the magnitude of binocular response, accounting for the fact that binocular responses in the primate primary visual cortex are less than the sum of monocular responses. To extract the most discriminative quality information from the summation and subtraction of the two branches of monocular features, we utilize a dual-pooling strategy that applies min-pooling and max-pooling operations to the respective branches. Experimental results highlight the superiority of our top-down method in advancing the state-of-the-art in the SIQA field. The code is available at https://github.com/HuilinZhang7/SATNet.