# Reference-Free Image Quality Metric for Degradation and Reconstruction Artifacts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02208 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02208/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Image Segmentation Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05566/) (2020)
- [Object Detection with Deep Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05511/) (2018)
- [fastMRI: An Open Dataset and Benchmarks for Accelerated MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08839/) (2018)
- [MoDL: Model Based Deep Learning Architecture for Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02862/) (2017)
- [PIPAL: a Large-Scale Image Quality Assessment Dataset for Perceptual Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12142/) (2020)
- [PieAPP: Perceptual Image-Error Assessment through Pairwise Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02067/) (2018)
- [Towards Fairer Datasets: Filtering and Balancing the Distribution of the People Subtree in the ImageNet Hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07726/) (2019)
- [Compression Artifacts Reduction by a Deep Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06993/) (2015)
- [A Survey on Instance Segmentation: State of the art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00047/) (2020)
- [Medical image denoising using convolutional denoising autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04667/) (2016)
- [Image Restoration Using Convolutional Auto-encoders with Symmetric Skip Connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08921/) (2016)
- [ADMM-Net: A Deep Learning Approach for Compressive Sensing MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06869/) (2017)
- [Jpeg Image Compression Using Discrete Cosine Transform - A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.6147/) (2014)
- [PDNet: Semantic Segmentation integrated with a Primal-Dual Network for Document binarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08694/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is essential in various Computer Vision tasks such as image deblurring and super-resolution. However, most IQA methods require reference images, which are not always available. While there are some reference-free IQA metrics, they have limitations in simulating human perception and discerning subtle image quality variations. We hypothesize that the JPEG quality factor is representatives of image quality measurement, and a well-trained neural network can learn to accurately evaluate image quality without requiring a clean reference, as it can recognize image degradation artifacts based on prior knowledge. Thus, we developed a reference-free quality evaluation network, dubbed "Quality Factor (QF) Predictor", which does not require any reference. Our QF Predictor is a lightweight, fully convolutional network comprising seven layers. The model is trained in a self-supervised manner: it receives JPEG compressed image patch with a random QF as input, is trained to accurately predict the corresponding QF. We demonstrate the versatility of the model by applying it to various tasks. First, our QF Predictor can generalize to measure the severity of various image artifacts, such as Gaussian Blur and Gaussian noise. Second, we show that the QF Predictor can be trained to predict the undersampling rate of images reconstructed from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data.