Papers › Attentions Help CNNs See Better: Attention-based Hybrid Image Quality Assessment Network

Attentions Help CNNs See Better: Attention-based Hybrid Image Quality Assessment Network

22 Apr 2022arXiv:2204.10485archive 2025-07-28

Shanshan Lao, Yuan Gong, Shuwei Shi, Sidi Yang, Tianhe Wu, Jiahao Wang, Weihao Xia, Yujiu Yang

Image quality assessment (IQA) algorithm aims to quantify the human perception of image quality. Unfortunately, there is a performance drop when assessing the distortion images generated by generative adversarial network (GAN) with seemingly realistic texture. In this work, we conjecture that this maladaptation lies in the backbone of IQA models, where patch-level prediction methods use independent image patches as input to calculate their scores separately, but lack spatial relationship modeling among image patches. Therefore, we propose an Attention-based Hybrid Image Quality Assessment Network (AHIQ) to deal with the challenge and get better performance on the GAN-based IQA task. Firstly, we adopt a two-branch architecture, including a vision transformer (ViT) branch and a convolutional neural network (CNN) branch for feature extraction. The hybrid architecture combines interaction information among image patches captured by ViT and local texture details from CNN. To make the features from shallow CNN more focused on the visually salient region, a deformable convolution is applied with the help of semantic information from the ViT branch. Finally, we use a patch-wise score prediction module to obtain the final score. The experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four standard IQA datasets and AHIQ ranked first on the Full Reference (FR) track of the NTIRE 2022 Perceptual Image Quality Assessment Challenge.

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Code

iigroup/ahiq officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
iigroup/maniqa mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Image Quality AssessmentVideo Quality Assessment

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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Quality Assessment MSU FR VQA Database AHIQ SRCC 0.937 #1 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Video Quality Assessment MSU FR VQA Database AHIQ KLCC 0.8015 #4 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Video Quality Assessment MSU FR VQA Database AHIQ SRCC 0.937 #4 of 20 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

AttentionConvolutionDeformable ConvolutionDense ConnectionsLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxVision Transformer

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