# Image Quality Assessment: Exploring Quality Awareness via Memory-driven Distortion Patterns Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18000 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18000/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment Using A Deep Bilinear Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02665/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [MetaIQA: Deep Meta-learning for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05508/) (2020)
- [Transformer for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01097/) (2020)
- [Attentions Help CNNs See Better: Attention-based Hybrid Image Quality Assessment Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10485/) (2022)
- [Perceptual Image Quality Assessment with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14730/) (2021)
- [Learning Conditional Knowledge Distillation for Degraded-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07948/) (2021)
- [Locally Adaptive Structure and Texture Similarity for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08521/) (2021)
- [DeepFL-IQA: Weak Supervision for Deep IQA Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08113/) (2020)
- [Projected Distribution Loss for Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09289/) (2020)
- [DeepWSD: Projecting Degradations in Perceptual Space to Wasserstein Distance in Deep Feature Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03323/) (2022)
- [Region-Adaptive Deformable Network for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11599/) (2021)
- [SwinIQA: Learned Swin Distance for Compressed Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04264/) (2022)
- [DeepDC: Deep Distance Correlation as a Perceptual Image Quality Evaluator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04927/) (2022)
- [PAME: Self-Supervised Masked Autoencoder for No-Reference Point Cloud Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10061/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) methods achieve high-precision evaluation by analysing feature differences between reference and distorted images. However, their performance is constrained by the quality of the reference image, which limits real-world applications where ideal reference sources are unavailable. Notably, the human visual system has the ability to accumulate visual memory, allowing image quality assessment on the basis of long-term memory storage. Inspired by this biological memory mechanism, we propose a memory-driven quality-aware framework (MQAF), which establishes a memory bank for storing distortion patterns and dynamically switches between dual-mode quality assessment strategies to reduce reliance on high-quality reference images. When reference images are available, MQAF obtains reference-guided quality scores by adaptively weighting reference information and comparing the distorted image with stored distortion patterns in the memory bank. When the reference image is absent, the framework relies on distortion patterns in the memory bank to infer image quality, enabling no-reference quality assessment (NR-IQA). The experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across multiple datasets while adapting to both no-reference and full-reference tasks.