Dual-Criterion Quality Loss for Blind Image Quality Assessment

This paper introduces a novel approach to Image Quality Assessment (IQA) by presenting a new loss function, Dual-Criterion Quality (DCQ) Loss, which integrates the Mean Squared Error (MSE) framework with a Relative Perception Constraint (RPC). The RPC is comprised of two main components: the Quantitative Discrepancy Constraint (QDC) and the Qualitative Alignment Constraint (QAC). The QDC focuses on capturing the numerical relationships of relative differences by minimizing the mean squared error between the differences in predicted scores among samples within a batch size and the differences in Mean Opinion Scores (MOS). Meanwhile, the QAC aims to capture the ordinal relationships between these differences. This method is designed to closely align with human subjective assessments of image quality, which are frequently quantified using the MOS, and to enhance the interpretability and reliability of IQA. Unlike existing ranking methods that suffer from complex pipelines and the introduction of errors through the generation of pair-wise or ordering data, DCQ Loss provides a more straightforward and efficient approach. Moreover, the loss function outperforms current rank-based IQA methods in terms of convergence, stability, and the ability to emulate human perception of visual quality. The effectiveness of this approach is validated through extensive experiments on various mainstream datasets and IQA network architectures, demonstrating significant performance gains over traditional rank loss approaches and contributing to the ongoing development of IQA.