Multi-information Aggregation Network for Fundus Image Quality Assessment

Abstract

Fundus image quality assessment (IQA) is essential for controlling the quality of retinal imaging and guaranteeing the reliability of diagnoses by ophthalmologists. Existing fundus IQA methods mainly explore local information to consider local distortions from convolutional neural networks (CNNs), yet ignoring global distortions. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-information aggregation network, termed MA-Net, for fundus IQA by extracting both local and global information. Specifically, MA-Net adopts an asymmetric dual-branch structure. For an input image, it uses the ResNet50 and vision transformer (ViT) to obtain the local and global representations from the upper and lower branches, respectively. In addition, MA-Net separately feed different images into the two branches to rank their quality for supplementing the feature representations. Thanks to the exploration of intra- and inter-class information between images, our MA-Net is competent for the fundus IQA task. Experiment results on the EyeQ dataset show that our MA-Net outperforms the baselines (i.e., ResNet50 and ViT) by 3.06% and 7.61% in Acc, and is superior to the mainstream methods.