# NIMA: Neural Image Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.05424 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05424/

## Key facts

- Cited by 389 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 389)

- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [MaxViT: Multi-Axis Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01697/) (2022)
- [Exploring Video Quality Assessment on User Generated Contents from Aesthetic and Technical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04894/) (2022)
- [Q-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Foundation Models on Low-level Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14181/) (2023)
- [TOPIQ: A Top-down Approach from Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03060/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Human-in-the-loop for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00941/) (2021)
- [No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Transformers, Relative Ranking, and Self-Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06858/) (2021)
- [Low-Light Image and Video Enhancement Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10729/) (2021)
- [AGIQA-3K: An Open Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04717/) (2023)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Regress Accurate Image Quality Scores using Score Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11561/) (2025)
- [AutoDIR: Automatic All-in-One Image Restoration with Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10123/) (2023)
- [Q-Insight: Understanding Image Quality via Visual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22679/) (2025)
- [VisualQuality-R1: Reasoning-Induced Image Quality Assessment via Reinforcement Learning to Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14460/) (2025)
- [RIDCP: Revitalizing Real Image Dehazing via High-Quality Codebook Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03994/) (2023)
- [Content-based Unrestricted Adversarial Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10665/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Semi-supervised Learning for Underwater Image Restoration via Reliable Bank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09101/) (2023)
- [Underwater Ranker: Learn Which Is Better and How to Be Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06857/) (2022)
- [VILA: Learning Image Aesthetics from User Comments with Vision-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14302/) (2023)
- [Instruct-Imagen: Image Generation with Multi-modal Instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01952/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models, Image Super-Resolution And Everything: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00736/) (2024)
- [Making Images Real Again: A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Image Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14490/) (2021)
- [Mobile Computational Photography: A Tour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09000/) (2021)
- [Perceive-IR: Learning to Perceive Degradation Better for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15994/) (2024)
- [SinDDM: A Single Image Denoising Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16582/) (2022)
- [Uni-paint: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Image Inpainting with Pretrained Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07222/) (2023)
- [A Survey on All-in-One Image Restoration: Taxonomy, Evaluation and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15067/) (2024)
- [A Perceptual Quality Assessment Exploration for AIGC Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12618/) (2023)
- [CFG-Zero*: Improved Classifier-Free Guidance for Flow Matching Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18886/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatically learned quality assessment for images has recently become a hot topic due to its usefulness in a wide variety of applications such as evaluating image capture pipelines, storage techniques and sharing media. Despite the subjective nature of this problem, most existing methods only predict the mean opinion score provided by datasets such as AVA [1] and TID2013 [2]. Our approach differs from others in that we predict the distribution of human opinion scores using a convolutional neural network. Our architecture also has the advantage of being significantly simpler than other methods with comparable performance. Our proposed approach relies on the success (and retraining) of proven, state-of-the-art deep object recognition networks. Our resulting network can be used to not only score images reliably and with high correlation to human perception, but also to assist with adaptation and optimization of photo editing/enhancement algorithms in a photographic pipeline. All this is done without need for a "golden" reference image, consequently allowing for single-image, semantic- and perceptually-aware, no-reference quality assessment.