In-the-wild image quality assessment with diffusion priors

Blind image quality assessment (IQA) in the wild, which assesses the quality of images with complex authentic distortions and no reference images, presents significant challenges. Given the difficulty in collecting large-scale training data, leveraging limited data to develop a model with strong gen...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Fu, Honghao
Other Authors: Wen Bihan
Format: Thesis-Master by Coursework
Language:English
Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/181882
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author Fu, Honghao
author2 Wen Bihan
author_facet Wen Bihan
Fu, Honghao
author_sort Fu, Honghao
collection NTU
description Blind image quality assessment (IQA) in the wild, which assesses the quality of images with complex authentic distortions and no reference images, presents significant challenges. Given the difficulty in collecting large-scale training data, leveraging limited data to develop a model with strong generalization remains an open problem. Motivated by the robust image perception capabilities of pretrained text-to image (T2I) diffusion models, we propose a novel IQA method, diffusion priors-based IQA (DP-IQA), to utilize the T2I model’s prior for improved performance and generalization ability. Specifically, we utilize pre-trained Stable Diffusion as the backbone, extracting multi-level features from the denoising U-Net guided by prompt embeddings through a tunable text adapter. Simultaneously, an image adapter compensates for information loss introduced by the lossy pre-trained encoder. Unlike T2I models that require full image distribution modeling, our approach targets image quality assessment, which inherently requires fewer parameters. To improve applicability, we distill the knowledge into a lightweight CNN-based student model, significantly reducing parameters while maintaining or even enhancing generalization performance. Experimental results demonstrate that DP-IQA achieves state-of-the-art performance on various in-the-wild datasets, highlighting the superior generalization capability of T2I priors in blind IQA tasks. To our knowledge, DP-IQA is the first method to apply pre-trained diffusion priors in blind IQA.
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spelling ntu-10356/1818822024-12-27T15:46:13Z In-the-wild image quality assessment with diffusion priors Fu, Honghao Wen Bihan School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Rapid-Rich Object Search (ROSE) Lab bihan.wen@ntu.edu.sg Computer and Information Science Blind IQA Diffusion prior Text-to-image model Knowledge distillation Blind image quality assessment (IQA) in the wild, which assesses the quality of images with complex authentic distortions and no reference images, presents significant challenges. Given the difficulty in collecting large-scale training data, leveraging limited data to develop a model with strong generalization remains an open problem. Motivated by the robust image perception capabilities of pretrained text-to image (T2I) diffusion models, we propose a novel IQA method, diffusion priors-based IQA (DP-IQA), to utilize the T2I model’s prior for improved performance and generalization ability. Specifically, we utilize pre-trained Stable Diffusion as the backbone, extracting multi-level features from the denoising U-Net guided by prompt embeddings through a tunable text adapter. Simultaneously, an image adapter compensates for information loss introduced by the lossy pre-trained encoder. Unlike T2I models that require full image distribution modeling, our approach targets image quality assessment, which inherently requires fewer parameters. To improve applicability, we distill the knowledge into a lightweight CNN-based student model, significantly reducing parameters while maintaining or even enhancing generalization performance. Experimental results demonstrate that DP-IQA achieves state-of-the-art performance on various in-the-wild datasets, highlighting the superior generalization capability of T2I priors in blind IQA tasks. To our knowledge, DP-IQA is the first method to apply pre-trained diffusion priors in blind IQA. Master's degree 2024-12-27T13:31:16Z 2024-12-27T13:31:16Z 2024 Thesis-Master by Coursework Fu, H. (2024). In-the-wild image quality assessment with diffusion priors. Master's thesis, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. https://hdl.handle.net/10356/181882 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/181882 en application/pdf Nanyang Technological University
spellingShingle Computer and Information Science
Blind IQA
Diffusion prior
Text-to-image model
Knowledge distillation
Fu, Honghao
In-the-wild image quality assessment with diffusion priors
title In-the-wild image quality assessment with diffusion priors
title_full In-the-wild image quality assessment with diffusion priors
title_fullStr In-the-wild image quality assessment with diffusion priors
title_full_unstemmed In-the-wild image quality assessment with diffusion priors
title_short In-the-wild image quality assessment with diffusion priors
title_sort in the wild image quality assessment with diffusion priors
topic Computer and Information Science
Blind IQA
Diffusion prior
Text-to-image model
Knowledge distillation
url https://hdl.handle.net/10356/181882
work_keys_str_mv AT fuhonghao inthewildimagequalityassessmentwithdiffusionpriors