McmIQA: Multi-Module Collaborative Model for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

No reference image quality assessment is a technique that uses computers to simulate the human visual system and automatically evaluate the perceived quality of images. In recent years, with the widespread success of deep learning in the field of computer vision, many end-to-end image quality assessment algorithms based on deep learning have emerged. However, unlike other computer vision tasks that focus on image content, an excellent image quality assessment model should simultaneously consider distortions in the image and comprehensively evaluate their relationships. Motivated by this, we propose a Multi-module Collaborative Model for Image Quality Assessment (McmIQA). The image quality assessment is divided into three subtasks: distortion perception, content recognition, and correlation mapping. And specific modules are constructed for each subtask: the distortion perception module, the content recognition module, and the correlation mapping module. Specifically, we apply two contrastive learning frameworks on two constructed datasets to train the distortion perception module and the content recognition module to extract two types of features from the image. Subsequently, using these extracted features as input, we employ a ranking loss to train the correlation mapping module to predict image quality on image quality assessment datasets. Extensive experiments conducted on seven relevant datasets demonstrated that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both synthetic distortion and natural distortion image quality assessment tasks.