Blind light field image quality assessment based on deep meta-learning.

In recent years, the use of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) for light field image quality assessment (LFIQA) has gained significant attention. Despite their notable successes, it is widely accepted that training DCNNs heavily depends on a large amount of annotated data. Additionally, convolutional network-based LFIQA methods show a limitation in capturing long-range dependencies. Unfortunately, LFIQA is essentially a typical small-sample problem, leading to existing DCNN-based LFIQA metrics requiring data augmentation but with unsatisfactory performance. To address these issues, this study proposes utilizing the self-attention capability of the Swin Transformer to efficiently capture spatial-angular information while employing meta-learning for small-sample learning in the LFIQA task. Specifically, a collection of LFIQA tasks is gathered, representing different distortions. Then, meta-learning is employed to acquire shared prior knowledge across diverse distortions. Finally, the quality prior model is fine-tuned on a target LFIQA task to obtain the final LFIQA model quickly. Experimental results show that the proposed LFIQA metric achieves high consistency with subjective scores, and outperforms several state-of-the-art LFIQA approaches.