영상 화질 평가 딥러닝 모델 재검토: 스트라이드 컨볼루션이 풀링보다 좋은가?

Revisiting Deep Learning Model for Image Quality Assessment: Is Strided Convolution Better than Pooling?

Due to the lack of improper image acquisition process, noise induction is an inevitable step. As a result, objective image quality assessment (IQA) plays an important role in estimating the visual quality of noisy image. Plenty of IQA methods have been proposed including traditional signal processing based methods as well as current deep learning based methods where the later one shows promising performance due to their complex representation ability. The deep learning based methods consists of several convolution layers and down sampling layers for feature extraction and fully connected layers for regression. Usually, the down sampling is performed by using max-pooling layer after each convolutional block. We reveal that this max-pooling causes information loss despite of knowing their importance. Consequently, we propose a better IQA method that replaces the max-pooling layers with strided convolutions to down sample the feature space and since the strided convolution layers have learnable parameters, they preserve optimal features and discard redundant information, thereby improve the prediction accuracy. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.