Quality assessment for User Generated Content (UGC) videos plays an important role in ensuring the viewing experience of end-users. Previous UGC video quality assessment (VQA) studies either use the image recognition model or the image quality assessment (IQA) models to extract frame-level features of UGC videos for quality regression, which are regarded as the sub-optimal solutions because of the domain shifts between these tasks and the UGC VQA task. In this paper, we propose a very simple but effective UGC VQA model, which tries to address this problem by training an end-to-end spatial feature extraction network to directly learn the quality-aware spatial feature representation from raw pixels of the video frames. We also extract the motion features to measure the temporal-related distortions that the spatial features cannot model. The proposed model utilizes very sparse frames to extract spatial features and dense frames (i.e. the video chunk) with a very low spatial resolution to extract motion features, which thereby has low computational complexity. With the better quality-aware features, we only use the simple multilayer perception layer (MLP) network to regress them into the chunk-level quality scores, and then the temporal average pooling strategy is adopted to obtain the video-level quality score. We further introduce a multi-scale quality fusion strategy to solve the problem of VQA across different spatial resolutions, where the multi-scale weights are obtained from the contrast sensitivity function of the human visual system. The experimental results show that the proposed model achieves the best performance on five popular UGC VQA databases, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model. The code will be publicly available.
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）
Video and image quality assessment has long been projected as a regression problem, which requires predicting a continuous quality score given an input stimulus. However, recent efforts have shown that accurate quality score regression on real-world user-generated content (UGC) is a very challenging task. To make the problem more tractable, we propose two new methods - binary, and ordinal classification - as alternatives to evaluate and compare no-reference quality models at coarser levels. Moreover, the proposed new tasks convey more practical meaning on perceptually optimized UGC transcoding…
This short paper presents a perspective plan to build a null reference image quality assessment. Its main goal is to deliver both the objective score and the distortion map for a given distorted image without the knowledge of its reference image.
In this paper, we propose a deep learning based video quality assessment (VQA) framework to evaluate the quality of the compressed user's generated content (UGC) videos. The proposed VQA framework consists of three modules, the feature extraction module, the quality regression module, and the quality pooling module. For the feature extraction module, we fuse the features from intermediate layers of the convolutional neural network (CNN) network into final quality-aware feature representation, which enables the model to make full use of visual information from low-level to high-level. Specifica…
Embodied Image Quality Assessment for Robotic Intelligence
Institute of Image Communication and Network Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（图像通信与网络工程研究所，上海交通大学）；College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology（信息科学与技术学院，北京化工大学）；USC-SJTU Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（USC-SJTU文化产业与创意产业研究所，上海交通大学）
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Image quality assessment(IQA) is of increasing importance for image-based applications. Its purpose is to establish a model that can replace humans for accurately evaluating image quality. According to whether the reference image is complete and available, image quality evaluation can be divided into three categories: full-reference(FR), reduced-reference(RR), and non-reference(NR) image quality assessment. Due to the vigorous development of deep learning and the widespread attention of researchers, several non-reference image quality assessment methods based on deep learning have been propose…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学）
Light field image (LFI) quality assessment is becoming more and more important, which helps to better guide the acquisition, processing and application of immersive media. However, due to the inherent high dimensional characteristics of LFI, the LFI quality assessment turns into a multi-dimensional problem that requires consideration of the quality degradation in both spatial and angular dimensions. Therefore, we propose a novel Tensor oriented No-reference Light Field image Quality evaluator (Tensor-NLFQ) based on tensor theory. Specifically, since the LFI is regarded as a low-rank 4D tensor,…
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Google Inc（谷歌公司）
In recent years, with the vigorous development of the video game industry, the proportion of gaming videos on major video websites like YouTube has dramatically increased. However, relatively little research has been done on the automatic quality prediction of gaming videos, especially on those that fall in the category of "User-Generated-Content" (UGC). Since current leading general-purpose Video Quality Assessment (VQA) models do not perform well on this type of gaming videos, we have created a new VQA model specifically designed to succeed on UGC gaming videos, which we call the Gaming Vide…
Audio-Visual Quality Assessment for User Generated Content: Database and Method
Institute of Image Communication and Information Processing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学图像通信与信息处理研究所）；Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering, Toronto Metropolitan University（多伦多都会大学电气、计算机与生物医学工程系）
Due to the existence of quality degradations introduced in various stages of visual signal acquisition, compression, transmission and display, image quality assessment (IQA) plays a vital role in image-based applications. According to whether the reference image is complete and available, image quality evaluation can be divided into three categories: Full-Reference(FR), Reduced- Reference(RR), and Non- Reference(NR). This article will review the state-of-the-art image quality assessment algorithms.
The main goal of objective image quality assessment is to devise computational, mathematical models which are able to predict perceptual image quality consistently with subjective evaluations. The evaluation of objective image quality assessment algorithms is based on experiments conducted on publicly available benchmark databases. In this study, our goal is to give a comprehensive evaluation about no-reference image quality assessment algorithms, whose original source codes are available online, using the recently published KADID-10k database which is one of the largest available benchmark da…
Significant progress has been made in the past decade for full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA). However, new large scale image quality databases have been released for evaluating image quality assessment algorithms. In this study, our goal is to give a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art FR-IQA metrics using the recently published KADID-10k database which is largest available one at the moment. Our evaluation results and the associated discussions is very helpful to obtain a clear understanding about the status of state-of-the-art FR-IQA metrics.
Objective image quality assessment deals with the prediction of digital images' perceptual quality. No-reference image quality assessment predicts the quality of a given input image without any knowledge or information about its pristine (distortion free) counterpart. Machine learning algorithms are heavily used in no-reference image quality assessment because it is very complicated to model the human visual system's quality perception. Moreover, no-reference image quality assessment algorithms are evaluated on publicly available benchmark databases. These databases contain images with their c…
Beijing University Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Understanding semantic information is an essential step in knowing what is being learned in both full-reference (FR) and no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) methods. However, especially for many severely distorted images, even if there is an undistorted image as a reference (FR-IQA), it is difficult to perceive the lost semantic and texture information of distorted images directly. In this paper, we propose a Mask Reference IQA (MR-IQA) method that masks specific patches of a distorted image and supplements missing patches with the reference image patches. In this way, our model o…
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Google LLC（谷歌有限责任公司）
Recent years have witnessed an explosion of user-generated content (UGC) videos shared and streamed over the Internet, thanks to the evolution of affordable and reliable consumer capture devices, and the tremendous popularity of social media platforms. Accordingly, there is a great need for accurate video quality assessment (VQA) models for UGC/consumer videos to monitor, control, and optimize this vast content. Blind quality prediction of in-the-wild videos is quite challenging, since the quality degradations of UGC content are unpredictable, complicated, and often commingled. Here we contrib…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）
An important scenario for image quality assessment (IQA) is to evaluate image restoration (IR) algorithms. The state-of-the-art approaches adopt a full-reference paradigm that compares restored images with their corresponding pristine-quality images. However, pristine-quality images are usually unavailable in blind image restoration tasks and real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a practical solution named degraded-reference IQA (DR-IQA), which exploits the inputs of IR models, degraded images, as references. Specifically, we extract reference information from degraded images by dist…
Miovision Technologies Inc.（Miovision Technologies 公司）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
Image quality assessment (IQA) continues to garner great interest in the research community, particularly given the tremendous rise in consumer video capture and streaming. Despite significant research effort in IQA in the past few decades, the area of no-reference image quality assessment remains a great challenge and is largely unsolved. In this paper, we propose a novel no-reference image quality assessment system called Deep Quality, which leverages the power of deep learning to model the complex relationship between visual content and the perceived quality. Deep Quality consists of a nove…
The rapid increase in user-generated-content (UGC) videos calls for the development of effective video quality assessment (VQA) algorithms. However, the objective of the UGC-VQA problem is still ambiguous and can be viewed from two perspectives: the technical perspective, measuring the perception of distortions; and the aesthetic perspective, which relates to preference and recommendation on contents. To understand how these two perspectives affect overall subjective opinions in UGC-VQA, we conduct a large-scale subjective study to collect human quality opinions on overall quality of videos as…
Blind or no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is a fundamental, unsolved, and yet challenging problem due to the unavailability of a reference image. It is vital to the streaming and social media industries that impact billions of viewers daily. Although previous NR-IQA methods leveraged different feature extraction approaches, the performance bottleneck still exists. In this paper, we propose a simple and yet effective general-purpose no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) framework based on multi-task learning. Our model employs distortion types as well as subjective huma…
Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology（塔帕尔工程技术学院）；Oxford Brookes University（牛津布鲁克斯大学）
With the inclusion of camera in daily life, an automatic no reference image quality evaluation index is required for automatic classification of images. The present manuscripts proposes a new No Reference Regional Mutual Information based technique for evaluating the quality of an image. We use regional mutual information on subsets of the complete image. Proposed technique is tested on four benchmark natural image databases, and one benchmark synthetic database. A comparative analysis with classical and state-of-art methods indicate superiority of the present technique for high quality images…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；University of Missouri-Kansas City（密苏里大学堪萨斯城分校）
In this paper, we propose a no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) method via feature level pseudo-reference (PR) hallucination. The proposed quality assessment framework is grounded on the prior models of natural image statistical behaviors and rooted in the view that the perceptually meaningful features could be well exploited to characterize the visual quality. Herein, the PR features from the distorted images are learned by a mutual learning scheme with the pristine reference as the supervision, and the discriminative characteristics of PR features are further ensured with the tr…
In practical media distribution systems, visual content usually undergoes multiple stages of quality degradation along the delivery chain, but the pristine source content is rarely available at most quality monitoring points along the chain to serve as a reference for quality assessment. As a result, full-reference (FR) and reduced-reference (RR) image quality assessment (IQA) methods are generally infeasible. Although no-reference (NR) methods are readily applicable, their performance is often not reliable. On the other hand, intermediate references of degraded quality are often available, e.…
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）
No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) aims to assess the perceptual quality of images in accordance with human subjective perception. Unfortunately, existing NR-IQA methods are far from meeting the needs of predicting accurate quality scores on GAN-based distortion images. To this end, we propose Multi-dimension Attention Network for no-reference Image Quality Assessment (MANIQA) to improve the performance on GAN-based distortion. We firstly extract features via ViT, then to strengthen global and local interactions, we propose the Transposed Attention Block (TAB) and the Scale Swin Tr…
A wide variety of image denoising methods are available now. However, the performance of a denoising algorithm often depends on individual input noisy images as well as its parameter setting. In this paper, we present a no-reference image denoising quality assessment method that can be used to select for an input noisy image the right denoising algorithm with the optimal parameter setting. This is a challenging task as no ground truth is available. This paper presents a data-driven approach to learn to predict image denoising quality. Our method is based on the observation that while individua…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Ningbo University（宁波大学）
360-degree/omnidirectional images (OIs) have achieved remarkable attentions due to the increasing applications of virtual reality (VR). Compared to conventional 2D images, OIs can provide more immersive experience to consumers, benefitting from the higher resolution and plentiful field of views (FoVs). Moreover, observing OIs is usually in the head mounted display (HMD) without references. Therefore, an efficient blind quality assessment method, which is specifically designed for 360-degree images, is urgently desired. In this paper, motivated by the characteristics of the human visual system …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学）
Light field image quality assessment (LFI-QA) is a significant and challenging research problem. It helps to better guide light field acquisition, processing and applications. However, only a few objective models have been proposed and none of them completely consider intrinsic factors affecting the LFI quality. In this paper, we propose a No-Reference Light Field image Quality Assessment (NR-LFQA) scheme, where the main idea is to quantify the LFI quality degradation through evaluating the spatial quality and angular consistency. We first measure the spatial quality deterioration by capturing…
The goal of full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) is to predict the quality of an image as perceived by human observers with using its pristine, reference counterpart. In this study, we explore a novel, combined approach which predicts the perceptual quality of a distorted image by compiling a feature vector from convolutional activation maps. More specifically, a reference-distorted image pair is run through a pretrained convolutional neural network and the activation maps are compared with a traditional image similarity metric. Subsequently, the resulted feature vector is mapped o…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
In no-reference 360-degree image quality assessment (NR 360IQA), graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which model interactions between viewports through graphs, have achieved impressive performance. However, prevailing GCN-based NR 360IQA methods suffer from three main limitations. First, they only use high-level features of the distorted image to regress the quality score, while the human visual system (HVS) scores the image based on hierarchical features. Second, they simplify complex high-order interactions between viewports in a pairwise fashion through graphs. Third, in the graph construc…
To support the application scenarios where high-resolution (HR) images are urgently needed, various single image super-resolution (SISR) algorithms are developed. However, SISR is an ill-posed inverse problem, which may bring artifacts like texture shift, blur, etc. to the reconstructed images, thus it is necessary to evaluate the quality of super-resolution images (SRIs). Note that most existing image quality assessment (IQA) methods were developed for synthetically distorted images, which may not work for SRIs since their distortions are more diverse and complicated. Therefore, in this paper…
Omnidirectional images, aka 360 images, can deliver immersive and interactive visual experiences. As their popularity has increased dramatically in recent years, evaluating the quality of 360 images has become a problem of interest since it provides insights for capturing, transmitting, and consuming this new media. However, directly adapting quality assessment methods proposed for standard natural images for omnidirectional data poses certain challenges. These models need to deal with very high-resolution data and implicit distortions due to the spherical form of the images. In this study, we…
The state-of-the-art pooling strategies for perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) are based on the mean and the weighted mean. They are robust pooling strategies which usually provide a moderate to high performance for different IQAs. Recently, standard deviation (SD) pooling was also proposed. Although, this deviation pooling provides a very high performance for a few IQAs, its performance is lower than mean poolings for many other IQAs. In this paper, we propose to use the mean absolute deviation (MAD) and show that it is a more robust and accurate pooling strategy for a wider range of I…
Qingdao University（青岛大学）；Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学）
Achieving subjective and objective quality assessment of underwater images is of high significance in underwater visual perception and image/video processing. However, the development of underwater image quality assessment (UIQA) is limited for the lack of comprehensive human subjective user study with publicly available dataset and reliable objective UIQA metric. To address this issue, we establish a large-scale underwater image dataset, dubbed UID2021, for evaluating no-reference UIQA metrics. The constructed dataset contains 60 multiply degraded underwater images collected from various sour…
Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad（印度理工学院海得拉巴分校）
We present a no reference (NR) quality assessment algorithm for assessing the perceptual quality of natural stereoscopic 3D (S3D) videos. This work is inspired by our finding that the joint statistics of the subband coefficients of motion (optical flow or motion vector magnitude) and depth (disparity map) of natural S3D videos possess a unique signature. Specifically, we empirically show that the joint statistics of the motion and depth subband coefficients of S3D video frames can be modeled accurately using a Bivariate Generalized Gaussian Distribution (BGGD). We then demonstrate that the par…
Smartphone is the most successful consumer electronic product in today's mobile social network era. The smartphone camera quality and its image post-processing capability is the dominant factor that impacts consumer's buying decision. However, the quality evaluation of photos taken from smartphones remains a labor-intensive work and relies on professional photographers and experts. As an extension of the prior CNN-based NR-IQA approach, we propose a multi-task deep CNN model with scene type detection as an auxiliary task. With the shared model parameters in the convolution layer, the learned f…
No-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is a fundamental yet challenging task in low-level computer vision community. The difficulty is particularly pronounced for the limited information, for which the corresponding reference for comparison is typically absent. Although various feature extraction mechanisms have been leveraged from natural scene statistics to deep neural networks in previous methods, the performance bottleneck still exists. In this work, we propose a hallucination-guided quality regression network to address the issue. We firstly generate a hallucinated reference const…
ZhongAn Information Technology Service Co., Ltd.（众安信息技术服务有限公司）
Document image quality assessment (DIQA) is an important and challenging problem in real applications. In order to predict the quality scores of document images, this paper proposes a novel no-reference DIQA method based on character gradient, where the OCR accuracy is used as a ground-truth quality metric. Character gradient is computed on character patches detected with the maximally stable extremal regions (MSER) based method. Character patches are essentially significant to character recognition and therefore suitable for use in estimating document image quality. Experiments on a benchmark…
This paper presents a high-performance general-purpose no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) method based on image entropy. The image features are extracted from two domains. In the spatial domain, the mutual information between the color channels and the two-dimensional entropy are calculated. In the frequency domain, the two-dimensional entropy and the mutual information of the filtered sub-band images are computed as the feature set of the input color image. Then, with all the extracted features, the support vector classifier (SVC) for distortion classification and support vector…
Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo（圣埃斯皮里图联邦大学）
This paper uses robust statistics and curvelet transform to learn a general-purpose no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) model. The new approach, here called M1, competes with the Curvelet Quality Assessment proposed in 2014 (Curvelet2014). The central idea is to use descriptors based on robust statistics to extract features and predict the human opinion about degraded images. To show the consistency of the method the model is tested with 3 different datasets, LIVE IQA, TID2013 and CSIQ. To test evaluation, it is used the Wilcoxon test to verify the statistical significance of resu…
Pierre and Marie Curie University（皮埃尔和玛丽居里大学）；ESPCI Paris, PSL Research University（巴黎高等物理化工学院，巴黎文理研究大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）
During the last decades, the number of new full-reference image quality assessment algorithms has been increasing drastically. Yet, despite of the remarkable progress that has been made, the medical ultrasound image similarity measurement remains largely unsolved due to a high level of speckle noise contamination. Potential applications of the ultrasound image similarity measurement seem evident in several aspects. To name a few, ultrasound imaging quality assessment, abnormal function region detection, etc. In this paper, a comparative study was made on full-reference image quality assessment…
No-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) aims to measure the image quality without reference image. However, contrast distortion has been overlooked in the current research of NR-IQA. In this paper, we propose a very simple but effective metric for predicting quality of contrast-altered images based on the fact that a high-contrast image is often more similar to its contrast enhanced image. Specifically, we first generate an enhanced image through histogram equalization. We then calculate the similarity of the original image and the enhanced one by using structural-similarity index (SSIM…
An innovative way of calculating the von Mises distribution (VMD) of image entropy is introduced in this paper. The VMD's concentration parameter and some fitness parameter that will be later defined, have been analyzed in the experimental part for determining their suitability as a image quality assessment measure in some particular distortions such as Gaussian blur or additive Gaussian noise. To achieve such measure, the local Rényi entropy is calculated in four equally spaced orientations and used to determine the parameters of the von Mises distribution of the image entropy. Considering co…
Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (Fraunhofer HHI)（弗劳恩霍夫海因里希·赫兹研究所）；Berlin Institute of Technology（柏林工业大学）
We present a deep neural network-based approach to image quality assessment (IQA). The network is trained end-to-end and comprises ten convolutional layers and five pooling layers for feature extraction, and two fully connected layers for regression, which makes it significantly deeper than related IQA models. Unique features of the proposed architecture are that: 1) with slight adaptations it can be used in a no-reference (NR) as well as in a full-reference (FR) IQA setting and 2) it allows for joint learning of local quality and local weights, i.e., relative importance of local quality to th…
Less is More: Learning Reference Knowledge Using No-Reference Image Quality Assessment
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Tencent Youtu Lab（腾讯云图实验室）；Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学）
