Create README.md

README.md

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+---
+tags:
+- image-quality-analysis
+---
+## Note on This Upload
+
+The weights included here (`HiRQA.pth`, `HiRQA-S.pth`) are **not modified**—they are simply **re-uploaded from the original authors for easier access and integration within the Hugging Face ecosystem** (e.g., `hf_hub_download`, XetFS, etc.).
+ All credit for the models and methodology goes to the original authors.
+
+
+Refer to original github repo for details: https://github.com/uf-robopi/HiRQA.
+
+
+
+##  Model Variants
+
+- **HiRQA (ResNet-50 backbone)** — higher accuracy, suitable for offline evaluation.
+- **HiRQA-S (ResNet-18 backbone)** — optimized for real-time applications.
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+## HiRQA: Hierarchical Ranking and Quality Alignment for Opinion-Unaware Image Quality Assessment
+
+**HiRQA** is an opinion-unaware no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) framework that learns a hierarchical, quality-aware embedding space without requiring human opinion scores during training. It introduces three key components:
+
+- **Pair-of-Pairs Ranking Loss** — enforces consistent hierarchical relationships between distortions.
+- **Embedding Distance Consistency Loss** — stabilizes relative quality ordering.
+- **Contrastive Image–Text Alignment** — improves generalization to real-world distortions via CLIP-based semantic cues.
+
+HiRQA requires only a **single distorted image at inference**, and its lightweight variant **HiRQA-S** provides real-time performance.