# GMC-IQA: Exploiting Global-correlation and Mean-opinion Consistency for No-reference Image Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.10511 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10511/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [KonIQ-10k: An ecologically valid database for deep learning of blind image quality assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06180/) (2019)
- [Deep Neural Networks for No-Reference and Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01697/) (2016)
- [Massive Online Crowdsourced Study of Subjective and Objective Picture Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02919/) (2015)
- [No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Transformers, Relative Ranking, and Self-Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06858/) (2021)
- [RankIQA: Learning from Rankings for No-reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08347/) (2017)
- [MetaIQA: Deep Meta-learning for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05508/) (2020)
- [Re-IQA: Unsupervised Learning for Image Quality Assessment in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00451/) (2023)
- [Image Quality Assessment using Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13266/) (2021)
- [dipIQ: Blind Image Quality Assessment by Learning-to-Rank Discriminable Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06505/) (2019)
- [Norm-in-Norm Loss with Faster Convergence and Better Performance for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03889/) (2020)
- [Hallucinated-IQA: No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01681/) (2018)
- [Data-Efficient Image Quality Assessment with Attention-Panel Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04952/) (2023)
- [Learning to Rank for Blind Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.0213/) (2013)
- [Learning to Blindly Assess Image Quality in the Laboratory and Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00516/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [PromptIQA: Boosting the Performance and Generalization for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04993/) (2024)
- [Deep Portrait Quality Assessment. A NTIRE 2024 Challenge Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11159/) (2024)
- [LAR-IQA: A Lightweight, Accurate, and Robust No-Reference Image Quality Assessment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17057/) (2024)
- [Differentiable Low-computation Global Correlation Loss for Monotonicity Evaluation in Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15485/) (2025)
- [FoMo: Forking Moment in Generative Trajectory as a Perceptual Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25716/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Due to the subjective nature of image quality assessment (IQA), assessing which image has better quality among a sequence of images is more reliable than assigning an absolute mean opinion score for an image. Thus, IQA models are evaluated by global correlation consistency (GCC) metrics like PLCC and SROCC, rather than mean opinion consistency (MOC) metrics like MAE and MSE. However, most existing methods adopt MOC metrics to define their loss functions, due to the infeasible computation of GCC metrics during training. In this work, we construct a novel loss function and network to exploit Global-correlation and Mean-opinion Consistency, forming a GMC-IQA framework. Specifically, we propose a novel GCC loss by defining a pairwise preference-based rank estimation to solve the non-differentiable problem of SROCC and introducing a queue mechanism to reserve previous data to approximate the global results of the whole data. Moreover, we propose a mean-opinion network, which integrates diverse opinion features to alleviate the randomness of weight learning and enhance the model robustness. Experiments indicate that our method outperforms SOTA methods on multiple authentic datasets with higher accuracy and generalization. We also adapt the proposed loss to various networks, which brings better performance and more stable training.