  Numerous image superresolution (SR) algorithms have been proposed for
reconstructing high-resolution (HR) images from input images with lower spatial
resolutions. However, effectively evaluating the perceptual quality of SR
images remains a challenging research problem. In this paper, we propose a
no-reference/blind deep neural network-based SR image quality assessor
(DeepSRQ). To learn more discriminative feature representations of various
distorted SR images, the proposed DeepSRQ is a two-stream convolutional network
including two subcomponents for distorted structure and texture SR images.
Different from traditional image distortions, the artifacts of SR images cause
both image structure and texture quality degradation. Therefore, we choose the
two-stream scheme that captures different properties of SR inputs instead of
directly learning features from one image stream. Considering the human visual
system (HVS) characteristics, the structure stream focuses on extracting
features in structural degradations, while the texture stream focuses on the
change in textural distributions. In addition, to augment the training data and
ensure the category balance, we propose a stride-based adaptive cropping
approach for further improvement. Experimental results on three publicly
available SR image quality databases demonstrate the effectiveness and
generalization ability of our proposed DeepSRQ method compared with
state-of-the-art image quality assessment algorithms.
