Efficient Context and Saliency Aware Transformer Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment.

No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) aims to estimate the perceptual image quality without access to reference images. To deal with it effectively and efficiently, in this work we propose a Context and Saliency aware Transformer Network (CSTNet), which is built based on a lightweight pyramid Vision Transformer (ViT). Specifically, a Multi-scale Context Aware Refinement (MCAR) block is devised to fully leverage hierarchical context features extracted by the ViT backbone. Further, saliency map prediction is incorporated as a sub-task to simulate the human attention on salient regions when perceiving images. Extensive experiments on public image quality datasets demonstrate its efficiency and superiority compared to the state-of-the-art models.