  Human fingerprints are detailed and nearly unique markers of human identity.
Such a unique and stable fingerprint is also left on each acquired image. It
can reveal how an image was degraded during the image acquisition procedure and
thus is closely related to the quality of an image. In this work, we propose a
new no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) approach called domain-aware
IQA (DA-IQA), which for the first time introduces the concept of domain
fingerprint to the NR-IQA field. The domain fingerprint of an image is learned
from image collections of different degradations and then used as the unique
characteristics to identify the degradation sources and assess the quality of
the image. To this end, we design a new domain-aware architecture, which
enables simultaneous determination of both the distortion sources and the
quality of an image. With the distortion in an image better characterized, the
image quality can be more accurately assessed, as verified by extensive
experiments, which show that the proposed DA-IQA performs better than almost
all the compared state-of-the-art NR-IQA methods.
