Graph-Driven Domain Co-Adaptation for Cross-Domain Image Quality Assessment

As a typical information medium, images are widely utilized across various application scenarios. Measuring image quality accurately is meaningful for the subsequent usability of images. However, significant variations exist in image types and distortion types in different application scenarios. And, acquiring labeled images for each specific scenario is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Consequently, designing cross-domain image quality assessment (IQA) that generalizes across different scenarios remains a substantial challenge. Existing cross-domain IQA methods primarily focus on content relevance while neglecting distortion differences between the source and target domains, leading to limited applicability while distortion fluctuates. To address these limitations, a Graph-Driven Domain Co-adaptation framework for cross-domain IQA (GDCIQA) is proposed. Firstly, a graph knowledge sharing (GKS) module that constructs graphs based on inter-domain distortion relevance has been proposed. GKS employs graph neural networks to update quality-aware features in the source domain by leveraging target-domain representations. Secondly, the proposed co-adaptation learning (CAL) mechanism can enable joint optimization of different modules, which ensures comprehensive sharing of quality-aware and distortion-related information. Finally, a domain adaptation framework that enables effective training on labeled source images to gain target-domain-optimized IQA models has been designed. Experimental results demonstrate that GDCIQA achieves enhanced accuracy and stability in cross-domain scenarios. The proposed GKS and CAL can benefit for advancing cross-domain IQA research.