Using HVS dual-pathway and contrast sensitivity to blindly assess image quality

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) aims to evaluate image quality in a way that closely matches human perception. To achieve this goal, the strengths of deep learning and the characteristics of the human visual system (HVS) can be combined. In this paper, inspired by the ventral pathway and the dorsal pathway of the HVS, a dual-pathway convolutional neural network is proposed for BIQA tasks. The proposed method consists of two pathways: the “what” pathway, which mimics the ventral pathway of the HVS to extract the content features of distorted images, and the “where” pathway, which mimics the dorsal pathway of the HVS to extract the global shape features of distorted images. Then, the features from the two pathways are fused and mapped to an image quality score. Additionally, gradient images weighted by contrast sensitivity are used as the input to the “where” pathway, allowing it to extract global shape features that are more sensitive to human perception. Moreover, a dual-pathway multi-scale feature fusion module is designed to fuse the multi-scale features of the two pathways, enabling the model to capture both global features and local details, thus improving the overall performance of the model. Experiments conducted on six databases show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Copyright © 2023 by the authors.