A Style Transfer-Based Fast Image Quality Assessment Method for Image Sensors

Accurate image quality evaluation is essential for optimizing sensor performance and enhancing the fidelity of visual data. The concept of "image style" encompasses the overall visual characteristics of an image, including elements such as colors, textures, shapes, lines, strokes, and other visual components. In this paper, we propose a novel full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) method that leverages the principles of style transfer, which we call style- and content-based IQA (SCIQA). Our approach consists of three main steps. First, we employ a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to decompose and represent images in the deep domain, capturing both low-level and high-level features. Second, we define a comprehensive deep perceptual distance metric between two images, taking into account both image content and style. This metric combines traditional content-based measures with style-based measures inspired by recent advances in neural style transfer. Finally, we formulate a perceptual optimization problem to determine the optimal parameters for the SCIQA model, which we solve via a convex optimization approach. Experimental results across multiple benchmark datasets (LIVE, CSIQ, TID2013, KADID-10k, and PIPAL) demonstrate that SCIQA outperforms state-of-the-art FR-IQA methods. Specifically, SCIQA achieves Pearson linear correlation coefficients (PLCC) of 0.956, 0.941, and 0.895 on the LIVE, CSIQ, and TID2013 datasets, respectively, outperforming traditional methods such as SSIM (PLCC: 0.847, 0.852, 0.665) and deep learning-based methods such as DISTS (PLCC: 0.924, 0.919, 0.855). The proposed method also demonstrates robust generalizability on the large-scale PIPAL dataset, achieving an SROCC of 0.702. Furthermore, SCIQA exhibits strong interpretability, exceptional prediction accuracy, and low computational complexity, making it a practical tool for real-world applications.