Dual Residual-Guided Interactive Learning for the Quality Assessment of Enhanced Images

Image enhancement algorithms can facilitate computer vision tasks in real applications. However, various distortions may also be introduced by image enhancement algorithms. Therefore, the image quality assessment (IQA) plays a crucial role in accurately evaluating enhanced images to provide dependable feedback. Current enhanced IQA methods are mainly designed for single specific scenarios, resulting in limited performance in other scenarios. Besides, no-reference methods predict quality utilizing enhanced images alone, which ignores the existing degraded images that contain valuable information, are not reliable enough. In this work, we propose a degraded-reference image quality assessment method based on dual residual-guided interactive learning (DRGQA) for the enhanced images in multiple scenarios. Specifically, a global and local feature collaboration module (GLCM) is proposed to imitate the perception of observers to capture comprehensive quality-aware features by using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and Transformers in an interactive manner. Then, we investigate the structure damage and color shift distortions that commonly occur in the enhanced images and propose a dual residual-guided module (DRGM) to make the model concentrate on the distorted regions that are sensitive to human visual system (HVS). Furthermore, a distortion-aware feature enhancement module (DEM) is proposed to improve the representation abilities of features in deeper networks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed DRGQA achieves superior performance with lower computational complexity compared to the state-of-the-art IQA methods.