In this paper, considering the retinal structure of human eye, and the composition characteristics of screen content images (SCIs), a multi-pathway convolutional neural network (CNN) with picture-text competition is proposed for SCIs quality assessment. According to the visual mechanism of human retina, we design a retinal structure simulation module, which uses multiple parallel convolution pathways to simulate the parallel transmission of visual signals by bipolar cells and uses a multi-pathway feature fusion (MPFF) module to allocate the weight for each channel to simulate horizontal cells' regulation of the information transmission. In addition, we design an adaptive feature extraction and competition module (AFEC) to directly extract the features of textural and pictorial regions and distribute the weight. Furthermore, the attention module combined with deformable convolution and channel attention can accurately extract image edge features and reduce redundancy of information. Experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the mainstream methods.