An Error Self-learning Semi-supervised Method for No-reference Image Quality Assessment

In recent years, deep learning has achieved significant progress in many respects. However, unlike other research fields with millions of labeled data such as image recognition, only several thousand labeled images are available in image quality assessment (IQA) field for deep learning, which heavily hinders the development and application for IQA. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we proposed an error self-learning semi-supervised method for no-reference (NR) IQA (ESSIQA), which is based on deep learning. We employed an advanced full reference (FR) IQA method to expand databases and supervise the training of network. In addition, the network outputs of expanding images were used as proxy labels replacing errors between subjective scores and objective scores to achieve error self-learning. Two weights of error back propagation were designed to reduce the impact of inaccurate outputs. The experimental results show that the proposed method yielded comparative effect.