Pixel-by-pixel Mean Opinion Score (pMOS) for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Deep-learning based techniques have contributed to the remarkable progress in the field of automatic image quality assessment (IQA). Existing IQA methods are designed to measure the quality of an image in terms of Mean Opinion Score (MOS) at the image-level (i.e. the whole image) or at the patch-level (dividing the image into multiple units and measuring quality of each patch). Some applications may require assessing the quality at the pixel-level (i.e. MOS value for each pixel), however, this is not possible in case of existing techniques as the spatial information is lost owing to their network structures. This paper proposes an IQA algorithm that can measure the MOS at the pixel-level, in addition to the image-level MOS. The proposed algorithm consists of three core parts, namely: i) Local IQA; ii) Region of Interest (ROI) prediction; iii) High-level feature embedding. The Local IQA part outputs the MOS at the pixel-level, or pixel-by-pixel MOS - we term it 'pMOS'. The ROI prediction part outputs weights that characterize the relative importance of region when calculating the image-level IQA. The high-level feature embedding part extracts high-level image features which are then embedded into the Local IQA part. In other words, the proposed algorithm yields three outputs: the pMOS which represents MOS for each pixel, the weights from the ROI indicating the relative importance of region, and finally the image-level MOS that is obtained by the weighted sum of pMOS and ROI values. The image-level MOS thus obtained by utilizing pMOS and ROI weights shows superior performance compared to the existing popular IQA techniques. In addition, visualization results indicate that predicted pMOS and ROI outputs are reasonably aligned with the general principles of the human visual system (HVS).