image quality assessment
An Unsupervised Information-Theoretic Perceptual Quality Metric
Tractable models of human perception have proved to be challenging to build. Hand-designed models such as MS-SSIM remain popular predictors of human image quality judgements due to their simplicity and speed. Recent modern deep learning approaches can perform better, but they rely on supervised data which can be costly to gather: large sets of class labels such as ImageNet, image quality ratings, or both. We combine recent advances in information-theoretic objective functions with a computational architecture informed by the physiology of the human visual system and unsupervised training on pairs of video frames, yielding our Perceptual Information Metric (PIM)1. We show that PIM is competitive with supervised metrics on the recent and challenging BAPPS image quality assessment dataset and outperforms them in predicting the ranking of image compression methods in CLIC 2020. We also perform qualitative experiments using the ImageNet-C dataset, and establish that PIM is robust with respect to architectural details.
Supplementary Materials for Assessor360: Multi-sequence Network for Blind Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment
The details of multiple datasets for OIQA task are presented in Table A. For the dataset that contains scanpath coordinates, we can directly sample viewport sequences from it and use our network to predict the quality scores. However, it is challenging and costly to record user scanpath data for every ODI in realistic scenarios. The scanpath information is likely unavailable when evaluating the quality of a panorama. Therefore, we propose a generalized Recursive Probability Sampling (RPS) method to generate multiple pseudo viewport sequences for the panorama, which assists the network to predict an accurate quality score in a way that is similar to the observer's actual scoring process. In JUFE and JXUFE, each ODI consists of 300 viewport coordinates, recorded using a head-mounted display (HMD).
Assessor360: Multi-sequence Network for Blind Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment
Blind Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment (BOIQA) aims to objectively assess the human perceptual quality of omnidirectional images (ODIs) without relying on pristine-quality image information. It is becoming more significant with the increasing advancement of virtual reality (VR) technology. However, the quality assessment of ODIs is severely hampered by the fact that the existing BOIQA pipeline lacks the modeling of the observer's browsing process. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel multi-sequence network for BOIQA called Assessor360, which is derived from the realistic multi-assessor ODI quality assessment procedure. Specifically, we propose a generalized Recursive Probability Sampling (RPS) method for the BOIQA task, combining content and details information to generate multiple pseudo viewport sequences from a given starting point.
Perceptual Attacks of No-Reference Image Quality Models with Human-in-the-Loop
No-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) aims to quantify how humans perceive visual distortions of digital images without access to their undistorted references. NR-IQA models are extensively studied in computational vision, and are widely used for performance evaluation and perceptual optimization of man-made vision systems. Here we make one of the first attempts to examine the perceptual robustness of NR-IQA models. Under a Lagrangian formulation, we identify insightful connections of the proposed perceptual attack to previous beautiful ideas in computer vision and machine learning. We test one knowledgedriven and three data-driven NR-IQA methods under four full-reference IQA models (as approximations to human perception of just-noticeable differences). Through carefully designed psychophysical experiments, we find that all four NRIQA models are vulnerable to the proposed perceptual attack. More interestingly, we observe that the generated counterexamples are not transferable, manifesting themselves as distinct design flows of respective NR-IQA methods.
Adaptive Image Quality Assessment via Teaching Large Multimodal Model to Compare
While recent advancements in large multimodal models (LMMs) have significantly improved their abilities in image quality assessment (IQA) relying on absolute quality rating, how to transfer reliable relative quality comparison outputs to continuous perceptual quality scores remains largely unexplored.