# Perception-oriented Bidirectional Attention Network for Image Super-resolution Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06442 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06442/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [EDVR: Video Restoration with Enhanced Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02716/) (2019)
- [KonIQ-10k: An ecologically valid database for deep learning of blind image quality assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06180/) (2019)
- [SeeSR: Towards Semantics-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16518/) (2023)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment Using A Deep Bilinear Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02665/) (2019)
- [Scaling Up to Excellence: Practicing Model Scaling for Photo-Realistic Image Restoration In the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13627/) (2024)
- [TOPIQ: A Top-down Approach from Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03060/) (2023)
- [Deep Neural Networks for No-Reference and Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01697/) (2016)
- [Gradient Magnitude Similarity Deviation: A Highly Efficient Perceptual Image Quality Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3052/) (2013)
- [No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Transformers, Relative Ranking, and Self-Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06858/) (2021)
- [RankSRGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks with Ranker for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06382/) (2019)
- [Learning a No-Reference Quality Metric for Single-Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05890/) (2016)
- [MetaIQA: Deep Meta-learning for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05508/) (2020)
- [Channel-wise and Spatial Feature Modulation Network for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11130/) (2018)
- [Efficient Real-world Image Super-Resolution Via Adaptive Directional Gradient Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07023/) (2024)
- [CAMixerSR: Only Details Need More "Attention"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19289/) (2024)
- [Image Quality Assessment for Perceptual Image Restoration: A New Dataset, Benchmark and Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15002/) (2020)
- [SeD: Semantic-Aware Discriminator for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19387/) (2024)
- [Quality Assessment of Image Super-Resolution: Balancing Deterministic and Statistical Fidelity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08689/) (2022)
- [LIQA: Lifelong Blind Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14115/) (2021)
- [Blind Quality Assessment for Image Superresolution Using Deep Two-Stream Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06163/) (2020)
- [Image Super-Resolution Quality Assessment: Structural Fidelity Versus Statistical Naturalness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07139/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [SSL-SSAW: Self-Supervised Learning with Sigmoid Self-Attention Weighting for Question-Based Sign Language Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14036/) (2025)
- [Perceptual Quality Optimization of Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21482/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many super-resolution (SR) algorithms have been proposed to increase image resolution. However, full-reference (FR) image quality assessment (IQA) metrics for comparing and evaluating different SR algorithms are limited. In this work, we propose the Perception-oriented Bidirectional Attention Network (PBAN) for image SR FR-IQA, which is composed of three modules: an image encoder module, a perception-oriented bidirectional attention (PBA) module, and a quality prediction module. First, we encode the input images for feature representations. Inspired by the characteristics of the human visual system, we then construct the perception-oriented PBA module. Specifically, different from existing attention-based SR IQA methods, we conceive a Bidirectional Attention to bidirectionally construct visual attention to distortion, which is consistent with the generation and evaluation processes of SR images. To further guide the quality assessment towards the perception of distorted information, we propose Grouped Multi-scale Deformable Convolution, enabling the proposed method to adaptively perceive distortion. Moreover, we design Sub-information Excitation Convolution to direct visual perception to both sub-pixel and sub-channel attention. Finally, the quality prediction module is exploited to integrate quality-aware features and regress quality scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed PBAN outperforms state-of-the-art quality assessment methods.