Binocular Rivalry and Fusion-Inspired Hierarchical Complementary Ensemble for No-Reference Stereoscopic Image Quality...

No-reference stereoscopic image quality assessment (NR-SIQA) remains a fundamental challenge due to the complex biological mechanisms of binocular rivalry and fusion, particularly under asymmetric distortions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework termed Multi-Stage Complementary Ensemble (MSCE). The core innovation lies in the Adaptive Selective Propagation (ASP) strategy embedded within a hierarchical Transformer architecture to dynamically regulates the fusion of binocular features. Specifically, by simulating the human visual system's transition from binocular rivalry to fusion, the ASP strategy applies nonlinear gain control to selectively reinforce features from the governing view based on binocular discrepancies. Furthermore, the proposed Hierarchical Complementary Fusion (HCF) module effectively captures and integrates low-level texture integrity, mid-level structural degradation, and high-level semantic consistency, leveraging ensemble learning principles, within a unified quality-aware manifold. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that the MSCE framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly in terms of prediction consistency under complex asymmetric distortions.