A Reference-Free Framework for Evaluating Single-Frame ISP Pipelines

Abstract

Evaluating camera image signal processing (ISP) pipelines requires measuring low-level artifacts introduced by operations such as denoising, demosaicing, tone mapping, and compression. Blind image quality assessment (IQA) techniques can grade visual quality without a reference, but they typically focus on semantic and high-level visual cues or human perceptual scores rather than the low-level image-processing artifacts introduced by camera pipelines. In contrast, full-reference metrics such as PSNR and SSIM measure pixel-level differences and structural similarity, while LPIPS measures perceptual similarity in deep feature space. However, these metrics require perfectly aligned image pairs, which are difficult to collect in practical settings. We propose a reference-free learning framework that estimates full-reference image quality metrics from a processed sRGB image and its ISO metadata. Our method predicts a proxy sRGB reference, which is then compared with the processed image to compute PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS in their standard full-reference form. Our experiments show that the proxy-reference model can be learned from synthetic data and applied to real camera data. We further show that lightweight LoRA fine-tuning enables efficient adaptation when ISP components or pipeline configurations are changed. The proposed method outperforms direct metric regression in estimating metric values and achieves higher agreement with full-reference rankings than conventional blind IQA methods. These results demonstrate the feasibility of reference-free estimation of full-reference metrics for practical camera-pipeline evaluation.