FreqAlign: Excavating Perception-oriented Transferability for Blind Image Quality Assessment from A Frequency Perspective

Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) is susceptible to poor transferability when the distribution shift occurs, e.g., from synthesis degradation to authentic degradation. To mitigate this, some studies have attempted to design unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) based schemes for BIQA, which intends to eliminate the domain shift through adversarial-based feature alignment. However, the feature alignment is usually taken at the low-frequency space of features since the global average pooling operation. This ignores the transferable perception knowledge in other frequency components and causes the sub-optimal solution for the UDA of BIQA. To overcome this, from a novel frequency perspective, we propose an effective alignment strategy, i.e., Frequency Alignment (dubbed FreqAlign), to excavate the perception-oriented transferability of BIQA in the frequency space. Concretely, we study what frequency components of features are more proper for perception-oriented alignment. Based on this, we propose to improve the perception-oriented transferability of BIQA by performing feature frequency decomposition and selecting the frequency components that contained the most transferable perception knowledge for alignment. To achieve a stable and effective frequency selection, we further propose the frequency movement with a sliding window to find the optimal frequencies for alignment, which is composed of three strategies, i.e., warm up with pre-training, frequency movement-based selection, and perturbation-based finetuning. Extensive experiments under different domain adaptation settings of BIQA have validated the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code will be released at https://github.com/lixinustc/Openworld-IQA.