# Spatial Moment Pooling Improves Neural Image Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.14583 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14583/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [NIMA: Neural Image Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05424/) (2017)
- [KonIQ-10k: An ecologically valid database for deep learning of blind image quality assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06180/) (2019)
- [High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09965/) (2020)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment Using A Deep Bilinear Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02665/) (2019)
- [From Patches to Pictures (PaQ-2-PiQ): Mapping the Perceptual Space of Picture Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10088/) (2019)
- [EnhanceNet: Single Image Super-Resolution Through Automated Texture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07919/) (2016)
- [Wide Activation for Efficient and Accurate Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08718/) (2018)
- [Deep CNNs Meet Global Covariance Pooling: Better Representation and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06836/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, there has been widespread attention drawn to convolutional neural network (CNN) based blind image quality assessment (IQA). A large number of works start by extracting deep features from CNN. Then, those features are processed through spatial average pooling (SAP) and fully connected layers to predict quality. Inspired by full reference IQA and texture features, in this paper, we extend SAP (1st moment) into spatial moment pooling (SMP) by incorporating higher order moments (such as variance, skewness). Moreover, we provide learning friendly normalization to circumvent numerical issue when computing gradients of higher moments. Experimental results suggest that simply upgrading SAP to SMP significantly enhances CNN-based blind IQA methods and achieves state of the art performance.