  Learning a typical image enhancement pipeline involves minimization of a loss
function between enhanced and reference images. While L1 and L2 losses are
perhaps the most widely used functions for this purpose, they do not
necessarily lead to perceptually compelling results. In this paper, we show
that adding a learned no-reference image quality metric to the loss can
significantly improve enhancement operators. This metric is implemented using a
CNN (convolutional neural network) trained on a large-scale dataset labelled
with aesthetic preferences of human raters. This loss allows us to conveniently
perform back-propagation in our learning framework to simultaneously optimize
for similarity to a given ground truth reference and perceptual quality. This
perceptual loss is only used to train parameters of image processing operators,
and does not impose any extra complexity at inference time. Our experiments
demonstrate that this loss can be effective for tuning a variety of operators
such as local tone mapping and dehazing.
