Deep multi-task learning for image/video distortions identification

Identifying distortions in images and videos is important and useful in various visual applications, such as image quality enhancement and assessment techniques. Instead of applying them blindly, these techniques can be applied or adjusted depending on the type of distortion identified. In this paper, we propose a deep multi-task learning (MTL) model for identifying the types of distortion in both images and videos, considering both single and multiple distortions. The proposed MTL model is composed of one convolutional neural network (CNN) shared between all tasks and N parallel classifiers, where each classifier is dedicated to identify a type of distortion. The proposed architecture also allows to adjust the number of tasks according to the number of distortion types considered, making the solution scalable. The proposed method has been evaluated on natural scene images and laparoscopic videos databases, each presenting a rich set of distortions. The experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves the best performance among the state-of-the-art methods for both single and multiple distortions (Code is available at: https://github.com/zoubidaameur/Deep-Multi-Task-Learning-for-Image-Video-Distortions-Identification). © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.