Can No-Reference Quality-Assessment Methods Serve as Perceptual Losses for Super-Resolution?

Abstract: Perceptual losses play an important role in constructing deep-neural-network-based methods by increasing the naturalness and realism of processed images and videos. Use of perceptual losses is often limited to LPIPS, a fullreference method. Even though deep no-reference image-qualityassessment methods are excellent at predicting human judgment, little research has examined their incorporation in loss functions. This paper investigates direct optimization of several video-superresolution models using no-reference image-quality-assessment methods as perceptual losses. Our experimental results show that straightforward optimization of these methods produce artifacts, but a special training procedure can mitigate them.