Multi-type Image Quality Assessment based on Multi-region Deep Feature Fusion under Meta-learning

Most existing image quality assessment methods need to be retrained when dealing with a new type of task. This approach wastes computing resources and time. Therefore, these methods fail to suit the application scenarios that require processing of multi-type image quality assessment tasks. In the human visual system, the eyes of human tend to pay varying degrees of attention to different regions. Inspired by this system, this paper proposes a multi-type image quality assessment method based on multi-region deep feature fusion under meta-learning (MMQA). First, we utilize the differences in the structural information to screen out salient and non-salient regions. Second, a deep multi-stream network is designed to comprehensively consider and fuse different features related to the quality in salient regions, non-salient regions and the entire image. Third, meta-learning is applied to quickly learn and update the parameters of the model when facing new types of images. By summarizing the prior knowledge in the training of one type of task, the model can be quickly fine-tuned for other types of images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has advantages over the existing methods in generalization and robustness. Furthermore, the proposed method can adapt well to different distortion types and different image types quickly and accurately.