A Bioinspired Deep Learning Framework for Saliency-Based Image Quality Assessment

Advancements in deep learning have led to significant progress in no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (NR-IQA) for evaluating the perceived quality of digital images without relying on a reference. However, existing NR-IQA models remain suboptimal in handling complex and diverse natural images. Visual saliency constitutes a critical element for enhancing the reliability of NR-IQA, but the optimal use of saliency in deep learning-based NR-IQA has not heretofore been significantly explored. In this article, we present a novel method for integrating saliency in NR-IQA, which is motivated by the saliency-based visual search mechanism that different parts of the visual input are visited by the focus of attention (FOA) in the order of decreasing saliency. By dividing saliency into the high and low levels of FOA, we build a bioinspired deep neural network–BioSIQNet–based on a multitask learning (MTL) framework. The network architecture consists of two saliency-specific tasks and one primary image quality assessment (IQA) task. The low and high saliency (HS) are separately encoded and integrated into the early and deeper layers of the IQA network, respectively, analogous to the hierarchical processing in the visual cortex of the brain that allocates low attentional resources to process the simple patterns and high resources to learn intricate representations. We demonstrate that leveraging the synergy between visual attention and image quality perception and joint learning of these interconnected visual tasks can enhance the overall learning capabilities of the primary IQA model. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed BioSIQNet for NR-IQA.