Alan C. Bovik

Zhengzhong Tu, Hossein Talebi, Han Zhang et al.

Transformers have recently gained significant attention in the computer vision community. However, the lack of scalability of self-attention mechanisms with respect to image size has limited their wide adoption in state-of-the-art vision backbones. In this paper we introduce an efficient and scalable attention model we call multi-axis attention, which consists of two aspects: blocked local and dilated global attention. These design choices allow global-local spatial interactions on arbitrary input resolutions with only linear complexity. We also present a new architectural element by effectively blending our proposed attention model with convolutions, and accordingly propose a simple hierarchical vision backbone, dubbed MaxViT, by simply repeating the basic building block over multiple stages. Notably, MaxViT is able to ''see'' globally throughout the entire network, even in earlier, high-resolution stages. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on a broad spectrum of vision tasks. On image classification, MaxViT achieves state-of-the-art performance under various settings: without extra data, MaxViT attains 86.5% ImageNet-1K top-1 accuracy; with ImageNet-21K pre-training, our model achieves 88.7% top-1 accuracy. For downstream tasks, MaxViT as a backbone delivers favorable performance on object detection as well as visual aesthetic assessment. We also show that our proposed model expresses strong generative modeling capability on ImageNet, demonstrating the superior potential of MaxViT blocks as a universal vision module. The source code and trained models will be available at https://github.com/google-research/maxvit.

Pavan C. Madhusudana, Neil Birkbeck, Yilin Wang et al.

Perceptual video quality assessment (VQA) is an integral component of many streaming and video sharing platforms. Here we consider the problem of learning perceptually relevant video quality representations in a self-supervised manner. Distortion type identification and degradation level determination is employed as an auxiliary task to train a deep learning model containing a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that extracts spatial features, as well as a recurrent unit that captures temporal information. The model is trained using a contrastive loss and we therefore refer to this training framework and resulting model as CONtrastive VIdeo Quality EstimaTor (CONVIQT). During testing, the weights of the trained model are frozen, and a linear regressor maps the learned features to quality scores in a no-reference (NR) setting. We conduct comprehensive evaluations of the proposed model on multiple VQA databases by analyzing the correlations between model predictions and ground-truth quality ratings, and achieve competitive performance when compared to state-of-the-art NR-VQA models, even though it is not trained on those databases. Our ablation experiments demonstrate that the learned representations are highly robust and generalize well across synthetic and realistic distortions. Our results indicate that compelling representations with perceptual bearing can be obtained using self-supervised learning. The implementations used in this work have been made available at https://github.com/pavancm/CONVIQT.

Runsheng Xu, Zhengzhong Tu, Yuanqi Du et al.

Restoring and inpainting the visual memories that are present, but often impaired, in old photos remains an intriguing but unsolved research topic. Decades-old photos often suffer from severe and commingled degradation such as cracks, defocus, and color-fading, which are difficult to treat individually and harder to repair when they interact. Deep learning presents a plausible avenue, but the lack of large-scale datasets of old photos makes addressing this restoration task very challenging. Here we present a novel reference-based end-to-end learning framework that is able to both repair and colorize old, degraded pictures. Our proposed framework consists of three modules: a restoration sub-network that conducts restoration from degradations, a similarity network that performs color histogram matching and color transfer, and a colorization subnet that learns to predict the chroma elements of images conditioned on chromatic reference signals. The overall system makes uses of color histogram priors from reference images, which greatly reduces the need for large-scale training data. We have also created a first-of-a-kind public dataset of real old photos that are paired with ground truth ''pristine'' photos that have been manually restored by PhotoShop experts. We conducted extensive experiments on this dataset and synthetic datasets, and found that our method significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models using both qualitative comparisons and quantitative measurements. The code is available at https://github.com/DerrickXuNu/Pik-Fix.

Shreshth Saini, Avinab Saha, Alan C. Bovik

We introduce HIDRO-VQA, a no-reference (NR) video quality assessment model designed to provide precise quality evaluations of High Dynamic Range (HDR) videos. HDR videos exhibit a broader spectrum of luminance, detail, and color than Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) videos. As HDR content becomes increasingly popular, there is a growing demand for video quality assessment (VQA) algorithms that effectively address distortions unique to HDR content. To address this challenge, we propose a self-supervised contrastive fine-tuning approach to transfer quality-aware features from the SDR to the HDR domain, utilizing unlabeled HDR videos. Our findings demonstrate that self-supervised pre-trained neural networks on SDR content can be further fine-tuned in a self-supervised setting using limited unlabeled HDR videos to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the only publicly available VQA database for HDR content, the LIVE-HDR VQA database. Moreover, our algorithm can be extended to the Full Reference VQA setting, also achieving state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available publicly at https://github.com/avinabsaha/HIDRO-VQA.

Li-Heng Chen, Christos G. Bampis, Zhi Li et al.

We describe a search-free resizing framework that can further improve the rate-distortion tradeoff of recent learned image compression models. Our approach is simple: compose a pair of differentiable downsampling/upsampling layers that sandwich a neural compression model. To determine resize factors for different inputs, we utilize another neural network jointly trained with the compression model, with the end goal of minimizing the rate-distortion objective. Our results suggest that "compression friendly" downsampled representations can be quickly determined during encoding by using an auxiliary network and differentiable image warping. By conducting extensive experimental tests on existing deep image compression models, we show results that our new resizing parameter estimation framework can provide Bjøntegaard-Delta rate (BD-rate) improvement of about 10% against leading perceptual quality engines. We also carried out a subjective quality study, the results of which show that our new approach yields favorable compressed images. To facilitate reproducible research in this direction, the implementation used in this paper is being made freely available online at: https://github.com/treammm/ResizeCompression.

Avinab Saha, Sandeep Mishra, Alan C. Bovik

Automatic Perceptual Image Quality Assessment is a challenging problem that impacts billions of internet, and social media users daily. To advance research in this field, we propose a Mixture of Experts approach to train two separate encoders to learn high-level content and low-level image quality features in an unsupervised setting. The unique novelty of our approach is its ability to generate low-level representations of image quality that are complementary to high-level features representing image content. We refer to the framework used to train the two encoders as Re-IQA. For Image Quality Assessment in the Wild, we deploy the complementary low and high-level image representations obtained from the Re-IQA framework to train a linear regression model, which is used to map the image representations to the ground truth quality scores, refer Figure 1. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple large-scale image quality assessment databases containing both real and synthetic distortions, demonstrating how deep neural networks can be trained in an unsupervised setting to produce perceptually relevant representations. We conclude from our experiments that the low and high-level features obtained are indeed complementary and positively impact the performance of the linear regressor. A public release of all the codes associated with this work will be made available on GitHub.

Zaixi Shang, Joshua P. Ebenezer, Alan C. Bovik et al.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) videos can represent a much greater range of brightness and color than Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) videos and are rapidly becoming an industry standard. HDR videos have more challenging capture, transmission, and display requirements than legacy SDR videos. With their greater bit depth, advanced electro-optical transfer functions, and wider color gamuts, comes the need for video quality algorithms that are specifically designed to predict the quality of HDR videos. Towards this end, we present the first publicly released large-scale subjective study of HDR videos. We study the effect of distortions such as compression and aliasing on the quality of HDR videos. We also study the effect of ambient illumination on perceptual quality of HDR videos by conducting the study in both a dark lab environment and a brighter living-room environment. A total of 66 subjects participated in the study and more than 20,000 opinion scores were collected, which makes this the largest in-lab study of HDR video quality ever. We anticipate that the dataset will be a valuable resource for researchers to develop better models of perceptual quality for HDR videos.

Xiangxu Yu, Zhenqiang Ying, Neil Birkbeck et al.

The rising popularity of online User-Generated-Content (UGC) in the form of streamed and shared videos, has hastened the development of perceptual Video Quality Assessment (VQA) models, which can be used to help optimize their delivery. Gaming videos, which are a relatively new type of UGC videos, are created when skilled gamers post videos of their gameplay. These kinds of screenshots of UGC gameplay videos have become extremely popular on major streaming platforms like YouTube and Twitch. Synthetically-generated gaming content presents challenges to existing VQA algorithms, including those based on natural scene/video statistics models. Synthetically generated gaming content presents different statistical behavior than naturalistic videos. A number of studies have been directed towards understanding the perceptual characteristics of professionally generated gaming videos arising in gaming video streaming, online gaming, and cloud gaming. However, little work has been done on understanding the quality of UGC gaming videos, and how it can be characterized and predicted. Towards boosting the progress of gaming video VQA model development, we conducted a comprehensive study of subjective and objective VQA models on UGC gaming videos. To do this, we created a novel UGC gaming video resource, called the LIVE-YouTube Gaming video quality (LIVE-YT-Gaming) database, comprised of 600 real UGC gaming videos. We conducted a subjective human study on this data, yielding 18,600 human quality ratings recorded by 61 human subjects. We also evaluated a number of state-of-the-art (SOTA) VQA models on the new database, including a new one, called GAME-VQP, based on both natural video statistics and CNN-learned features. To help support work in this field, we are making the new LIVE-YT-Gaming Database, publicly available through the link: https://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/LIVE-YT-Gaming/index.html .

Joshua P. Ebenezer, Zaixi Shang, Yixu Chen et al.

We conducted a large-scale study of human perceptual quality judgments of High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) videos subjected to scaling and compression levels and viewed on three different display devices. HDR videos are able to present wider color gamuts, better contrasts, and brighter whites and darker blacks than SDR videos. While conventional expectations are that HDR quality is better than SDR quality, we have found subject preference of HDR versus SDR depends heavily on the display device, as well as on resolution scaling and bitrate. To study this question, we collected more than 23,000 quality ratings from 67 volunteers who watched 356 videos on OLED, QLED, and LCD televisions. Since it is of interest to be able to measure the quality of videos under these scenarios, e.g. to inform decisions regarding scaling, compression, and SDR vs HDR, we tested several well-known full-reference and no-reference video quality models on the new database. Towards advancing progress on this problem, we also developed a novel no-reference model called HDRPatchMAX, that uses both classical and bit-depth sensitive distortion statistics more accurately than existing metrics.

Joshua P. Ebenezer, Zaixi Shang, Yongjun Wu et al.

We introduce a novel feature set, which we call HDRMAX features, that when included into Video Quality Assessment (VQA) algorithms designed for Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) videos, sensitizes them to distortions of High Dynamic Range (HDR) videos that are inadequately accounted for by these algorithms. While these features are not specific to HDR, and also augment the equality prediction performances of VQA models on SDR content, they are especially effective on HDR. HDRMAX features modify powerful priors drawn from Natural Video Statistics (NVS) models by enhancing their measurability where they visually impact the brightest and darkest local portions of videos, thereby capturing distortions that are often poorly accounted for by existing VQA models. As a demonstration of the efficacy of our approach, we show that, while current state-of-the-art VQA models perform poorly on 10-bit HDR databases, their performances are greatly improved by the inclusion of HDRMAX features when tested on HDR and 10-bit distorted videos.

Somdyuti Paul, Andrey Norkin, Alan C. Bovik

Adaptive video streaming relies on the construction of efficient bitrate ladders to deliver the best possible visual quality to viewers under bandwidth constraints. The traditional method of content dependent bitrate ladder selection requires a video shot to be pre-encoded with multiple encoding parameters to find the optimal operating points given by the convex hull of the resulting rate-quality curves. However, this pre-encoding step is equivalent to an exhaustive search process over the space of possible encoding parameters, which causes significant overhead in terms of both computation and time expenditure. To reduce this overhead, we propose a deep learning based method of content aware convex hull prediction. We employ a recurrent convolutional network (RCN) to implicitly analyze the spatiotemporal complexity of video shots in order to predict their convex hulls. A two-step transfer learning scheme is adopted to train our proposed RCN-Hull model, which ensures sufficient content diversity to analyze scene complexity, while also making it possible to capture the scene statistics of pristine source videos. Our experimental results reveal that our proposed model yields better approximations of the optimal convex hulls, and offers competitive time savings as compared to existing approaches. On average, the pre-encoding time was reduced by 53.8% by our method, while the average Bjontegaard delta bitrate (BD-rate) of the predicted convex hulls against ground truth was 0.26%, and the mean absolute deviation of the BD-rate distribution was 0.57%.

Joshua P. Ebenezer, Zaixi Shang, Yongjun Wu et al.

We present a no-reference video quality model and algorithm that delivers standout performance for High Dynamic Range (HDR) videos, which we call HDR-ChipQA. HDR videos represent wider ranges of luminances, details, and colors than Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) videos. The growing adoption of HDR in massively scaled video networks has driven the need for video quality assessment (VQA) algorithms that better account for distortions on HDR content. In particular, standard VQA models may fail to capture conspicuous distortions at the extreme ends of the dynamic range, because the features that drive them may be dominated by distortions {that pervade the mid-ranges of the signal}. We introduce a new approach whereby a local expansive nonlinearity emphasizes distortions occurring at the higher and lower ends of the {local} luma range, allowing for the definition of additional quality-aware features that are computed along a separate path. These features are not HDR-specific, and also improve VQA on SDR video contents, albeit to a reduced degree. We show that this preprocessing step significantly boosts the power of distortion-sensitive natural video statistics (NVS) features when used to predict the quality of HDR content. In similar manner, we separately compute novel wide-gamut color features using the same nonlinear processing steps. We have found that our model significantly outperforms SDR VQA algorithms on the only publicly available, comprehensive HDR database, while also attaining state-of-the-art performance on SDR content.

Zhenqiang Ying, Deepti Ghadiyaram, Alan Bovik

Video conferencing, which includes both video and audio content, has contributed to dramatic increases in Internet traffic, as the COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of people to work and learn from home. Global Internet traffic of video conferencing has dramatically increased Because of this, efficient and accurate video quality tools are needed to monitor and perceptually optimize telepresence traffic streamed via Zoom, Webex, Meet, etc. However, existing models are limited in their prediction capabilities on multi-modal, live streaming telepresence content. Here we address the significant challenges of Telepresence Video Quality Assessment (TVQA) in several ways. First, we mitigated the dearth of subjectively labeled data by collecting ~2k telepresence videos from different countries, on which we crowdsourced ~80k subjective quality labels. Using this new resource, we created a first-of-a-kind online video quality prediction framework for live streaming, using a multi-modal learning framework with separate pathways to compute visual and audio quality predictions. Our all-in-one model is able to provide accurate quality predictions at the patch, frame, clip, and audiovisual levels. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both existing quality databases and our new TVQA database, at a considerably lower computational expense, making it an attractive solution for mobile and embedded systems.

Pavan C. Madhusudana, Neil Birkbeck, Yilin Wang et al.

We consider the problem of capturing distortions arising from changes in frame rate as part of Video Quality Assessment (VQA). Variable frame rate (VFR) videos have become much more common, and streamed videos commonly range from 30 frames per second (fps) up to 120 fps. VFR-VQA offers unique challenges in terms of distortion types as well as in making non-uniform comparisons of reference and distorted videos having different frame rates. The majority of current VQA models require compared videos to be of the same frame rate, but are unable to adequately account for frame rate artifacts. The recently proposed Generalized Entropic Difference (GREED) VQA model succeeds at this task, using natural video statistics models of entropic differences of temporal band-pass coefficients, delivering superior performance on predicting video quality changes arising from frame rate distortions. Here we propose a simple fusion framework, whereby temporal features from GREED are combined with existing VQA models, towards improving model sensitivity towards frame rate distortions. We find through extensive experiments that this feature fusion significantly boosts model performance on both HFR/VFR datasets as well as fixed frame rate (FFR) VQA databases. Our results suggest that employing efficient temporal representations can result much more robust and accurate VQA models when frame rate variations can occur.

Abhinau K. Venkataramanan, Alan C. Bovik

Information-theoretic image quality assessment (IQA) models such as Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) and Spatio-temporal Reduced Reference Entropic Differences (ST-RRED) have enjoyed great success by seamlessly integrating natural scene statistics (NSS) with information theory. The Gaussian Scale Mixture (GSM) model that governs the wavelet subband coefficients of natural images forms the foundation for these algorithms. However, the explosion of user-generated content on social media, which is typically distorted by one or more of many possible unknown impairments, has revealed the limitations of NSS-based IQA models that rely on the simple GSM model. Here, we seek to elaborate the VIF index by deriving useful properties of the Multivariate Generalized Gaussian Distribution (MGGD), and using them to study the behavior of VIF under a Generalized GSM (GGSM) model.

Sandeep Mishra, Yasamin Jafarian, Andreas Lugmayr et al.

Photographs of people taken by professional photographers typically present the person in beautiful lighting, with an interesting pose, and flattering quality. This is unlike common photos people can take of themselves. In this paper, we explore how to create a ``professional'' version of a person's photograph, i.e., in a chosen pose, in a simple environment, with good lighting, and standard black top/bottom clothing. A key challenge is to preserve the person's unique identity, face and body features while transforming the photo. If there would exist a large paired dataset of the same person photographed both ``in the wild'' and by a professional photographer, the problem would potentially be easier to solve. However, such data does not exist, especially for a large variety of identities. To that end, we propose two key insights: 1) Our method transforms the input photo and person's face to a canonical UV space, which is further coupled with reposing methodology to model occlusions and novel view synthesis. Operating in UV space allows us to leverage existing unpaired datasets. 2) We personalize the output photo via multi image finetuning. Our approach yields high-quality, reposed portraits and achieves strong qualitative and quantitative performance on real-world imagery.

Ruoxi Zhu, Zhengzhong Tu, Jiaming Liu et al.

Restoring images captured under adverse weather conditions is a fundamental task for many computer vision applications. However, most existing weather restoration approaches are only capable of handling a specific type of degradation, which is often insufficient in real-world scenarios, such as rainy-snowy or rainy-hazy weather. Towards being able to address these situations, we propose a multi-weather Transformer, or MWFormer for short, which is a holistic vision Transformer that aims to solve multiple weather-induced degradations using a single, unified architecture. MWFormer uses hyper-networks and feature-wise linear modulation blocks to restore images degraded by various weather types using the same set of learned parameters. We first employ contrastive learning to train an auxiliary network that extracts content-independent, distortion-aware feature embeddings that efficiently represent predicted weather types, of which more than one may occur. Guided by these weather-informed predictions, the image restoration Transformer adaptively modulates its parameters to conduct both local and global feature processing, in response to multiple possible weather. Moreover, MWFormer allows for a novel way of tuning, during application, to either a single type of weather restoration or to hybrid weather restoration without any retraining, offering greater controllability than existing methods. Our experimental results on multi-weather restoration benchmarks show that MWFormer achieves significant performance improvements compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, without requiring much computational cost. Moreover, we demonstrate that our methodology of using hyper-networks can be integrated into various network architectures to further boost their performance. The code is available at: https://github.com/taco-group/MWFormer

Abhijay Ghildyal, Rajesh Sureddi, Nabajeet Barman et al.

Evaluating the perceptual quality of Novel View Synthesis (NVS) images remains a key challenge, particularly in the absence of pixel-aligned ground truth references. Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment (FR-IQA) methods fail under misalignment, while No-Reference (NR-IQA) methods struggle with generalization. In this work, we introduce a Non-Aligned Reference (NAR-IQA) framework tailored for NVS, where it is assumed that the reference view shares partial scene content but lacks pixel-level alignment. We constructed a large-scale image dataset containing synthetic distortions targeting Temporal Regions of Interest (TROI) to train our NAR-IQA model. Our model is built on a contrastive learning framework that incorporates LoRA-enhanced DINOv2 embeddings and is guided by supervision from existing IQA methods. We train exclusively on synthetically generated distortions, deliberately avoiding overfitting to specific real NVS samples and thereby enhancing the model's generalization capability. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art FR-IQA, NR-IQA, and NAR-IQA methods, achieving robust performance on both aligned and non-aligned references. We also conducted a novel user study to gather data on human preferences when viewing non-aligned references in NVS. We find strong correlation between our proposed quality prediction model and the collected subjective ratings. For dataset and code, please visit our project page: https://stootaghaj.github.io/nova-project/

Qi Zheng, Yibo Fan, Leilei Huang et al.

Video quality assessment (VQA) is an important processing task, aiming at predicting the quality of videos in a manner highly consistent with human judgments of perceived quality. Traditional VQA models based on natural image and/or video statistics, which are inspired both by models of projected images of the real world and by dual models of the human visual system, deliver only limited prediction performances on real-world user-generated content (UGC), as exemplified in recent large-scale VQA databases containing large numbers of diverse video contents crawled from the web. Fortunately, recent advances in deep neural networks and Large Multimodality Models (LMMs) have enabled significant progress in solving this problem, yielding better results than prior handcrafted models. Numerous deep learning-based VQA models have been developed, with progress in this direction driven by the creation of content-diverse, large-scale human-labeled databases that supply ground truth psychometric video quality data. Here, we present a comprehensive survey of recent progress in the development of VQA algorithms and the benchmarking studies and databases that make them possible. We also analyze open research directions on study design and VQA algorithm architectures. Github link: https://github.com/taco-group/Video-Quality-Assessment-A-Comprehensive-Survey.

Bowen Chen, Cheng-han Lee, Yixu Chen et al.

We introduce HDRSDR-VQA, a large-scale video quality assessment dataset designed to facilitate comparative analysis between High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) content under realistic viewing conditions. The dataset comprises 960 videos generated from 54 diverse source sequences, each presented in both HDR and SDR formats across nine distortion levels. To obtain reliable perceptual quality scores, we conducted a comprehensive subjective study involving 145 participants and six consumer-grade HDR-capable televisions. A total of over 22,000 pairwise comparisons were collected and scaled into Just-Objectionable-Difference (JOD) scores. Unlike prior datasets that focus on a single dynamic range format or use limited evaluation protocols, HDRSDR-VQA enables direct content-level comparison between HDR and SDR versions, supporting detailed investigations into when and why one format is preferred over the other. The open-sourced part of the dataset is publicly available to support further research in video quality assessment, content-adaptive streaming, and perceptual model development.

Abhinau K. Venkataramanan, Alan C. Bovik

High Dynamic Range (HDR) videos are able to represent wider ranges of contrasts and colors than Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) videos, giving more vivid experiences. Due to this, HDR videos are expected to grow into the dominant video modality of the future. However, HDR videos are incompatible with existing SDR displays, which form the majority of affordable consumer displays on the market. Because of this, HDR videos must be processed by tone-mapping them to reduced bit-depths to service a broad swath of SDR-limited video consumers. Here, we analyze the impact of tone-mapping operators on the visual quality of streaming HDR videos. To this end, we built the first large-scale subjectively annotated open-source database of compressed tone-mapped HDR videos, containing 15,000 tone-mapped sequences derived from 40 unique HDR source contents. The videos in the database were labeled with more than 750,000 subjective quality annotations, collected from more than 1,600 unique human observers. We demonstrate the usefulness of the new subjective database by benchmarking objective models of visual quality on it. We envision that the new LIVE Tone-Mapped HDR (LIVE-TMHDR) database will enable significant progress on HDR video tone mapping and quality assessment in the future. To this end, we make the database freely available to the community at https://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/LIVE_TMHDR/index.html

Rajesh Sureddi, Saman Zadtootaghaj, Nabajeet Barman et al.

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) models aim to predict perceptual image quality in alignment with human judgments. No-Reference (NR) IQA remains particularly challenging due to the absence of a reference image. While deep learning has significantly advanced this field, a major hurdle in developing NR-IQA models is the limited availability of subjectively labeled data. Most existing deep learning-based NR-IQA approaches rely on pre-training on large-scale datasets before fine-tuning for IQA tasks. To further advance progress in this area, we propose a novel approach that constructs a custom dataset using a limited number of reference content images and introduces a no-reference IQA model that incorporates both content and quality features for perceptual quality prediction. Specifically, we train a quality-aware model using contrastive triplet-based learning, enabling efficient training with fewer samples while achieving strong generalization performance across publicly available datasets. Our repository is available at https://github.com/rajeshsureddi/triqa.

Sandeep Mishra, Mukul Jha, Alan C. Bovik

We conducted a large-scale subjective study of the perceptual quality of User-Generated Mobile Video Content on a set of mobile-originated videos obtained from the Indian social media platform ShareChat. The content viewed by volunteer human subjects under controlled laboratory conditions has the benefit of culturally diversifying the existing corpus of User-Generated Content (UGC) video quality datasets. There is a great need for large and diverse UGC-VQA datasets, given the explosive global growth of the visual internet and social media platforms. This is particularly true in regard to videos obtained by smartphones, especially in rapidly emerging economies like India. ShareChat provides a safe and cultural community oriented space for users to generate and share content in their preferred Indian languages and dialects. Our subjective quality study, which is based on this data, offers a boost of cultural, visual, and language diversification to the video quality research community. We expect that this new data resource will also allow for the development of systems that can predict the perceived visual quality of Indian social media videos, to control scaling and compression protocols for streaming, provide better user recommendations, and guide content analysis and processing. We demonstrate the value of the new data resource by conducting a study of leading blind video quality models on it, including a new model, called MoEVA, which deploys a mixture of experts to predict video quality. Both the new LIVE-ShareChat dataset and sample source code for MoEVA are being made freely available to the research community at https://github.com/sandeep-sm/LIVE-SC

Krishna Srikar Durbha, Hassene Tmar, Ping-Hao Wu et al.

Over the past few years, per-title and per-shot video encoding techniques have demonstrated significant gains as compared to conventional techniques such as constant CRF encoding and the fixed bitrate ladder. These techniques have demonstrated that constructing content-gnostic per-shot bitrate ladders can provide significant bitrate gains and improved Quality of Experience (QoE) for viewers under various network conditions. However, constructing a convex hull for every video incurs a significant computational overhead. Recently, machine learning-based bitrate ladder construction techniques have emerged as a substitute for convex hull construction. These methods operate by extracting features from source videos to train machine learning (ML) models to construct content-adaptive bitrate ladders. Here, we present a new ML-based bitrate ladder construction technique that accurately predicts the VMAF scores of compressed videos, by analyzing the compression procedure and by making perceptually relevant measurements on the source videos prior to compression. We evaluate the performance of our proposed framework against leading prior methods on a large corpus of videos. Since training ML models on every encoder setting is time-consuming, we also investigate how per-shot bitrate ladders perform under different encoding settings. We evaluate the performance of all models against the fixed bitrate ladder and the best possible convex hull constructed using exhaustive encoding with Bjontegaard-delta metrics.

Sandeep Mishra, Oindrila Saha, Alan C. Bovik

Motion-preserved video editing is crucial for creators, particularly in scenarios that demand flexibility in both the structure and semantics of swapped objects. Despite its potential, this area remains underexplored. Existing diffusion-based editing methods excel in structure-preserving tasks, using dense guidance signals to ensure content integrity. While some recent methods attempt to address structure-variable editing, they often suffer from issues such as temporal inconsistency, subject identity drift, and the need for human intervention. To address these challenges, we introduce VidMP3, a novel approach that leverages pose and position priors to learn a generalized motion representation from source videos. Our method enables the generation of new videos that maintain the original motion while allowing for structural and semantic flexibility. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/sandeep-sm/VidMP3.

Shashank Gupta, Gregoire Phillips, Alan C. Bovik

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have recently enabled considerable advances in the realm of image and video quality assessment, but this progress has yet to be fully explored in the domain of 3D assets. We are interested in using these models to conduct No-Reference Point Cloud Quality Assessment (NR-PCQA), where the aim is to automatically evaluate the perceptual quality of a point cloud in absence of a reference. We begin with the observation that different modalities of data - text descriptions, 2D projections, and 3D point cloud views - provide complementary information about point cloud quality. We then construct PIT-QMM, a novel LMM for NR-PCQA that is capable of consuming text, images and point clouds end-to-end to predict quality scores. Extensive experimentation shows that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art by significant margins on popular benchmarks with fewer training iterations. We also demonstrate that our framework enables distortion localization and identification, which paves a new way forward for model explainability and interactivity. Code and datasets are available at https://www.github.com/shngt/pit-qmm.

Qi Zheng, Li-Heng Chen, Chenlong He et al.

Although there have been notable advancements in video compression technologies in recent years, banding artifacts remain a serious issue affecting the quality of compressed videos, particularly on smooth regions of high-definition videos. Noticeable banding artifacts can severely impact the perceptual quality of videos viewed on a high-end HDTV or high-resolution screen. Hence, there is a pressing need for a systematic investigation of the banding video quality assessment problem for advanced video codecs. Given that the existing publicly available datasets for studying banding artifacts are limited to still picture data only, which cannot account for temporal banding dynamics, we have created a first-of-a-kind open video dataset, dubbed LIVE-YT-Banding, which consists of 160 videos generated by four different compression parameters using the AV1 video codec. A total of 7,200 subjective opinions are collected from a cohort of 45 human subjects. To demonstrate the value of this new resources, we tested and compared a variety of models that detect banding occurrences, and measure their impact on perceived quality. Among these, we introduce an effective and efficient new no-reference (NR) video quality evaluator which we call CBAND. CBAND leverages the properties of the learned statistics of natural images expressed in the embeddings of deep neural networks. Our experimental results show that the perceptual banding prediction performance of CBAND significantly exceeds that of previous state-of-the-art models, and is also orders of magnitude faster. Moreover, CBAND can be employed as a differentiable loss function to optimize video debanding models. The LIVE-YT-Banding database, code, and pre-trained model are all publically available at https://github.com/uniqzheng/CBAND.

Yunxiang Li, Meixu Chen, Kai Wang et al.

Image translation has wide applications, such as style transfer and modality conversion, usually aiming to generate images having both high degrees of realism and faithfulness. These problems remain difficult, especially when it is important to preserve content structures. Traditional image-level similarity metrics are of limited use, since the content structures of an image are high-level, and not strongly governed by pixel-wise faithfulness to an original image. To fill this gap, we introduce SAMScore, a generic content structural similarity metric for evaluating the faithfulness of image translation models. SAMScore is based on the recent high-performance Segment Anything Model (SAM), which allows content similarity comparisons with standout accuracy. We applied SAMScore on 19 image translation tasks, and found that it is able to outperform all other competitive metrics on all tasks. We envision that SAMScore will prove to be a valuable tool that will help to drive the vibrant field of image translation, by allowing for more precise evaluations of new and evolving translation models. The code is available at https://github.com/Kent0n-Li/SAMScore.

Zhengzhong Tu, Hossein Talebi, Han Zhang et al.

Recent progress on Transformers and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) models provide new network architectural designs for computer vision tasks. Although these models proved to be effective in many vision tasks such as image recognition, there remain challenges in adapting them for low-level vision. The inflexibility to support high-resolution images and limitations of local attention are perhaps the main bottlenecks. In this work, we present a multi-axis MLP based architecture called MAXIM, that can serve as an efficient and flexible general-purpose vision backbone for image processing tasks. MAXIM uses a UNet-shaped hierarchical structure and supports long-range interactions enabled by spatially-gated MLPs. Specifically, MAXIM contains two MLP-based building blocks: a multi-axis gated MLP that allows for efficient and scalable spatial mixing of local and global visual cues, and a cross-gating block, an alternative to cross-attention, which accounts for cross-feature conditioning. Both these modules are exclusively based on MLPs, but also benefit from being both global and `fully-convolutional', two properties that are desirable for image processing. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed MAXIM model achieves state-of-the-art performance on more than ten benchmarks across a range of image processing tasks, including denoising, deblurring, deraining, dehazing, and enhancement while requiring fewer or comparable numbers of parameters and FLOPs than competitive models. The source code and trained models will be available at \url{https://github.com/google-research/maxim}.

Qi Zheng, Zhengzhong Tu, Pavan C. Madhusudana et al.

Video quality assessment (VQA) remains an important and challenging problem that affects many applications at the widest scales. Recent advances in mobile devices and cloud computing techniques have made it possible to capture, process, and share high resolution, high frame rate (HFR) videos across the Internet nearly instantaneously. Being able to monitor and control the quality of these streamed videos can enable the delivery of more enjoyable content and perceptually optimized rate control. Accordingly, there is a pressing need to develop VQA models that can be deployed at enormous scales. While some recent effects have been applied to full-reference (FR) analysis of variable frame rate and HFR video quality, the development of no-reference (NR) VQA algorithms targeting frame rate variations has been little studied. Here, we propose a first-of-a-kind blind VQA model for evaluating HFR videos, which we dub the Framerate-Aware Video Evaluator w/o Reference (FAVER). FAVER uses extended models of spatial natural scene statistics that encompass space-time wavelet-decomposed video signals, to conduct efficient frame rate sensitive quality prediction. Our extensive experiments on several HFR video quality datasets show that FAVER outperforms other blind VQA algorithms at a reasonable computational cost. To facilitate reproducible research and public evaluation, an implementation of FAVER is being made freely available online: \url{https://github.com/uniqzheng/HFR-BVQA}.

Pavan C. Madhusudana, Neil Birkbeck, Yilin Wang et al.

We consider the problem of obtaining image quality representations in a self-supervised manner. We use prediction of distortion type and degree as an auxiliary task to learn features from an unlabeled image dataset containing a mixture of synthetic and realistic distortions. We then train a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) using a contrastive pairwise objective to solve the auxiliary problem. We refer to the proposed training framework and resulting deep IQA model as the CONTRastive Image QUality Evaluator (CONTRIQUE). During evaluation, the CNN weights are frozen and a linear regressor maps the learned representations to quality scores in a No-Reference (NR) setting. We show through extensive experiments that CONTRIQUE achieves competitive performance when compared to state-of-the-art NR image quality models, even without any additional fine-tuning of the CNN backbone. The learned representations are highly robust and generalize well across images afflicted by either synthetic or authentic distortions. Our results suggest that powerful quality representations with perceptual relevance can be obtained without requiring large labeled subjective image quality datasets. The implementations used in this paper are available at \url{https://github.com/pavancm/CONTRIQUE}.

Zhengzhong Tu, Xiangxu Yu, Yilin Wang et al.

Blind or no-reference video quality assessment of user-generated content (UGC) has become a trending, challenging, heretofore unsolved problem. Accurate and efficient video quality predictors suitable for this content are thus in great demand to achieve more intelligent analysis and processing of UGC videos. Previous studies have shown that natural scene statistics and deep learning features are both sufficient to capture spatial distortions, which contribute to a significant aspect of UGC video quality issues. However, these models are either incapable or inefficient for predicting the quality of complex and diverse UGC videos in practical applications. Here we introduce an effective and efficient video quality model for UGC content, which we dub the Rapid and Accurate Video Quality Evaluator (RAPIQUE), which we show performs comparably to state-of-the-art (SOTA) models but with orders-of-magnitude faster runtime. RAPIQUE combines and leverages the advantages of both quality-aware scene statistics features and semantics-aware deep convolutional features, allowing us to design the first general and efficient spatial and temporal (space-time) bandpass statistics model for video quality modeling. Our experimental results on recent large-scale UGC video quality databases show that RAPIQUE delivers top performances on all the datasets at a considerably lower computational expense. We hope this work promotes and inspires further efforts towards practical modeling of video quality problems for potential real-time and low-latency applications. To promote public usage, an implementation of RAPIQUE has been made freely available online: \url{https://github.com/vztu/RAPIQUE}.

Christos G. Bampis, Zhi Li, Alan C. Bovik

Perceptual video quality assessment models are either frame-based or video-based, i.e., they apply spatiotemporal filtering or motion estimation to capture temporal video distortions. Despite their good performance on video quality databases, video-based approaches are time-consuming and harder to efficiently deploy. To balance between high performance and computational efficiency, Netflix developed the Video Multi-method Assessment Fusion (VMAF) framework, which integrates multiple quality-aware features to predict video quality. Nevertheless, this fusion framework does not fully exploit temporal video quality measurements which are relevant to temporal video distortions. To this end, we propose two improvements to the VMAF framework: SpatioTemporal VMAF and Ensemble VMAF. Both algorithms exploit efficient temporal video features which are fed into a single or multiple regression models. To train our models, we designed a large subjective database and evaluated the proposed models against state-of-the-art approaches. The compared algorithms will be made available as part of the open source package in https://github.com/Netflix/vmaf.

Hui Zeng, Lei Zhang, Alan C. Bovik

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) remains a very challenging problem due to the unavailability of a reference image. Deep learning based BIQA methods have been attracting increasing attention in recent years, yet it remains a difficult task to train a robust deep BIQA model because of the very limited number of training samples with human subjective scores. Most existing methods learn a regression network to minimize the prediction error of a scalar image quality score. However, such a scheme ignores the fact that an image will receive divergent subjective scores from different subjects, which cannot be adequately represented by a single scalar number. This is particularly true on complex, real-world distorted images. Moreover, images may broadly differ in their distributions of assigned subjective scores. Recognizing this, we propose a new representation of perceptual image quality, called probabilistic quality representation (PQR), to describe the image subjective score distribution, whereby a more robust loss function can be employed to train a deep BIQA model. The proposed PQR method is shown to not only speed up the convergence of deep model training, but to also greatly improve the achievable level of quality prediction accuracy relative to scalar quality score regression methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/HuiZeng/BIQA_Toolbox.

Sai Karthikey Pentapati, Anshul Rai, Arkady Ten et al.

High-resolution texture maps are necessary for representing real-world objects accurately with 3D meshes. The large sizes of textures can bottleneck the real-time rendering of high-quality virtual 3D scenes on devices having low computational budgets and limited memory. Downsampling the texture maps directly addresses the issue, albeit at the cost of visual fidelity. Traditionally, downsampling of texture maps is performed using methods like bicubic interpolation and the Lanczos algorithm. These methods ignore the geometric layout of the mesh and its UV parametrization and also do not account for the rendering process used to obtain the final visualization that the users will experience. Towards filling these gaps, we introduce GeoScaler, which is a method of downsampling texture maps of 3D meshes while incorporating geometric cues, and by maximizing the visual fidelity of the rendered views of the textured meshes. We show that the textures generated by GeoScaler deliver significantly better quality rendered images compared to those generated by traditional downsampling methods

Sai Karthikey Pentapati, Gregoire Phillips, Alan Bovik

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have been demonstrated to achieve state-of-the-art compression of a broad range of modalities such as images, videos, 3D surfaces, and audio. Most studies have focused on building neural counterparts of traditional implicit representations of 3D geometries, such as signed distance functions. However, the triangle mesh-based representation of geometry remains the most widely used representation in the industry, while building INRs capable of generating them has been sparsely studied. In this paper, we present a method for building compact INRs of zero-genus 3D manifolds. Our method relies on creating a spherical parameterization of a given 3D mesh - mapping the surface of a mesh to that of a unit sphere - then constructing an INR that encodes the displacement vector field defined continuously on its surface that regenerates the original shape. The compactness of our representation can be attributed to its hierarchical structure, wherein it first recovers the coarse structure of the encoded surface before adding high-frequency details to it. Once the INR is computed, 3D meshes of arbitrary resolution/connectivity can be decoded from it. The decoding can be performed in real time while achieving a state-of-the-art trade-off between reconstruction quality and the size of the compressed representations.

Wei Zhou, Hadi Amirpour, Christian Timmerer et al.

As multimedia services such as video streaming, video conferencing, virtual reality (VR), and online gaming continue to expand, ensuring high perceptual visual quality becomes a priority to maintain user satisfaction and competitiveness. However, multimedia content undergoes various distortions during acquisition, compression, transmission, and storage, resulting in the degradation of experienced quality. Thus, perceptual visual quality assessment (PVQA), which focuses on evaluating the quality of multimedia content based on human perception, is essential for optimizing user experiences in advanced communication systems. Several challenges are involved in the PVQA process, including diverse characteristics of multimedia content such as image, video, VR, point cloud, mesh, multimodality, etc., and complex distortion scenarios as well as viewing conditions. In this paper, we first present an overview of PVQA principles and methods. This includes both subjective methods, where users directly rate their experiences, and objective methods, where algorithms predict human perception based on measurable factors such as bitrate, frame rate, and compression levels. Based on the basics of PVQA, quality predictors for different multimedia data are then introduced. In addition to traditional images and videos, immersive multimedia and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) content are also discussed. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion on the future directions of PVQA research.

Abhijay Ghildyal, Yuanhan Chen, Saman Zadtootaghaj et al.

The advent of AI has influenced many aspects of human life, from self-driving cars and intelligent chatbots to text-based image and video generation models capable of creating realistic images and videos based on user prompts (text-to-image, image-to-image, and image-to-video). AI-based methods for image and video super resolution, video frame interpolation, denoising, and compression have already gathered significant attention and interest in the industry and some solutions are already being implemented in real-world products and services. However, to achieve widespread integration and acceptance, AI-generated and enhanced content must be visually accurate, adhere to intended use, and maintain high visual quality to avoid degrading the end user's quality of experience (QoE). One way to monitor and control the visual "quality" of AI-generated and -enhanced content is by deploying Image Quality Assessment (IQA) and Video Quality Assessment (VQA) models. However, most existing IQA and VQA models measure visual fidelity in terms of "reconstruction" quality against a pristine reference content and were not designed to assess the quality of "generative" artifacts. To address this, newer metrics and models have recently been proposed, but their performance evaluation and overall efficacy have been limited by datasets that were too small or otherwise lack representative content and/or distortion capacity; and by performance measures that can accurately report the success of an IQA/VQA model for "GenAI". This paper examines the current shortcomings and possibilities presented by AI-generated and enhanced image and video content, with a particular focus on end-user perceived quality. Finally, we discuss open questions and make recommendations for future work on the "GenAI" quality assessment problems, towards further progressing on this interesting and relevant field of research.

Abhinau K. Venkataramanan, Cosmin Stejerean, Ioannis Katsavounidis et al.

Recent years have seen steady growth in the popularity and availability of High Dynamic Range (HDR) content, particularly videos, streamed over the internet. As a result, assessing the subjective quality of HDR videos, which are generally subjected to compression, is of increasing importance. In particular, we target the task of full-reference quality assessment of compressed HDR videos. The state-of-the-art (SOTA) approach HDRMAX involves augmenting off-the-shelf video quality models, such as VMAF, with features computed on non-linearly transformed video frames. However, HDRMAX increases the computational complexity of models like VMAF. Here, we show that an efficient class of video quality prediction models named FUNQUE+ achieves SOTA accuracy. This shows that the FUNQUE+ models are flexible alternatives to VMAF that achieve higher HDR video quality prediction accuracy at lower computational cost.

Abhinau K. Venkataramanan, Cosmin Stejerean, Ioannis Katsavounidis et al.

The deep learning revolution has strongly impacted low-level image processing tasks such as style/domain transfer, enhancement/restoration, and visual quality assessments. Despite often being treated separately, the aforementioned tasks share a common theme of understanding, editing, or enhancing the appearance of input images without modifying the underlying content. We leverage this observation to develop a novel disentangled representation learning method that decomposes inputs into content and appearance features. The model is trained in a self-supervised manner and we use the learned features to develop a new quality prediction model named DisQUE. We demonstrate through extensive evaluations that DisQUE achieves state-of-the-art accuracy across quality prediction tasks and distortion types. Moreover, we demonstrate that the same features may also be used for image processing tasks such as HDR tone mapping, where the desired output characteristics may be tuned using example input-output pairs.

Shreshth Saini, Ru-Ling Liao, Yan Ye et al.

Despite recent advancements in latent diffusion models that generate high-dimensional image data and perform various downstream tasks, there has been little exploration into perceptual consistency within these models on the task of No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA). In this paper, we hypothesize that latent diffusion models implicitly exhibit perceptually consistent local regions within the data manifold. We leverage this insight to guide on-manifold sampling using perceptual features and input measurements. Specifically, we propose Perceptual Manifold Guidance (PMG), an algorithm that utilizes pretrained latent diffusion models and perceptual quality features to obtain perceptually consistent multi-scale and multi-timestep feature maps from the denoising U-Net. We empirically demonstrate that these hyperfeatures exhibit high correlation with human perception in IQA tasks. Our method can be applied to any existing pretrained latent diffusion model and is straightforward to integrate. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work on guiding diffusion model with perceptual features for NR-IQA. Extensive experiments on IQA datasets show that our method, LGDM, achieves state-of-the-art performance, underscoring the superior generalization capabilities of diffusion models for NR-IQA tasks.

Abhinau K. Venkataramanan, Cosmin Stejerean, Ioannis Katsavounidis et al.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) videos have enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years due to their ability to represent a wider range of contrast and color than Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) videos. Although HDR video capture has seen increasing popularity because of recent flagship mobile phones such as Apple iPhones, Google Pixels, and Samsung Galaxy phones, a broad swath of consumers still utilize legacy SDR displays that are unable to display HDR videos. As result, HDR videos must be processed, i.e., tone-mapped, before streaming to a large section of SDR-capable video consumers. However, server-side tone-mapping involves automating decisions regarding the choices of tone-mapping operators (TMOs) and their parameters to yield high-fidelity outputs. Moreover, these choices must be balanced against the effects of lossy compression, which is ubiquitous in streaming scenarios. In this work, we develop a novel, efficient model of objective video quality named Cut-FUNQUE that is able to accurately predict the visual quality of tone-mapped and compressed HDR videos. Finally, we evaluate Cut-FUNQUE on a large-scale crowdsourced database of such videos and show that it achieves state-of-the-art accuracy.

Bowen Chen, Zaixi Shang, Jae Won Chung et al.

Demand for streaming services, including satellite, continues to exhibit unprecedented growth. Internet Service Providers find themselves at the crossroads of technological advancements and rising customer expectations. To stay relevant and competitive, these ISPs must ensure their networks deliver optimal video streaming quality, a key determinant of user satisfaction. Towards this end, it is important to have accurate Quality of Experience prediction models in place. However, achieving robust performance by these models requires extensive data sets labeled by subjective opinion scores on videos impaired by diverse playback disruptions. To bridge this data gap, we introduce the LIVE-Viasat Real-World Satellite QoE Database. This database consists of 179 videos recorded from real-world streaming services affected by various authentic distortion patterns. We also conducted a comprehensive subjective study involving 54 participants, who contributed both continuous-time opinion scores and endpoint (retrospective) QoE scores. Our analysis sheds light on various determinants influencing subjective QoE, such as stall events, spatial resolutions, bitrate, and certain network parameters. We demonstrate the usefulness of this unique new resource by evaluating the efficacy of prevalent QoE-prediction models on it. We also created a new model that maps the network parameters to predicted human perception scores, which can be used by ISPs to optimize the video streaming quality of their networks. Our proposed model, which we call SatQA, is able to accurately predict QoE using only network parameters, without any access to pixel data or video-specific metadata, estimated by Spearman's Rank Order Correlation Coefficient (SROCC), Pearson Linear Correlation Coefficient (PLCC), and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), indicating high accuracy and reliability.

Shreshth Saini, Alan C. Bovik, Neil Birkbeck et al.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) videos enhance visual experiences with superior brightness, contrast, and color depth. The surge of User-Generated Content (UGC) on platforms like YouTube and TikTok introduces unique challenges for HDR video quality assessment (VQA) due to diverse capture conditions, editing artifacts, and compression distortions. Existing HDR-VQA datasets primarily focus on professionally generated content (PGC), leaving a gap in understanding real-world UGC-HDR degradations. To address this, we introduce CHUG: Crowdsourced User-Generated HDR Video Quality Dataset, the first large-scale subjective study on UGC-HDR quality. CHUG comprises 856 UGC-HDR source videos, transcoded across multiple resolutions and bitrates to simulate real-world scenarios, totaling 5,992 videos. A large-scale study via Amazon Mechanical Turk collected 211,848 perceptual ratings. CHUG provides a benchmark for analyzing UGC-specific distortions in HDR videos. We anticipate CHUG will advance No-Reference (NR) HDR-VQA research by offering a large-scale, diverse, and real-world UGC dataset. The dataset is publicly available at: https://shreshthsaini.github.io/CHUG/.

Hakan Emre Gedik, Andrew Martin, Mustafa Munir et al.

Vision Graph Neural Networks (ViGs) have demonstrated promising performance in image recognition tasks against Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). An essential part of the ViG framework is the node-neighbor feature aggregation method. Although various graph convolution methods, such as Max-Relative, EdgeConv, GIN, and GraphSAGE, have been explored, a versatile aggregation method that effectively captures complex node-neighbor relationships without requiring architecture-specific refinements is needed. To address this gap, we propose a cross-attention-based aggregation method in which the query projections come from the node, while the key projections come from its neighbors. Additionally, we introduce a novel architecture called AttentionViG that uses the proposed cross-attention aggregation scheme to conduct non-local message passing. We evaluated the image recognition performance of AttentionViG on the ImageNet-1K benchmark, where it achieved SOTA performance. Additionally, we assessed its transferability to downstream tasks, including object detection and instance segmentation on MS COCO 2017, as well as semantic segmentation on ADE20K. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method not only achieves strong performance, but also maintains efficiency, delivering competitive accuracy with comparable FLOPs to prior vision GNN architectures.

Krishna Srikar Durbha, Asvin Kumar Venkataramanan, Rajesh Sureddi et al.

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) models are employed in many practical image and video processing pipelines to reduce storage, minimize transmission costs, and improve the Quality of Experience (QoE) of millions of viewers. These models are sensitive to a diverse range of image distortions and can accurately predict image quality as judged by human viewers. Recent advancements in generative models have resulted in a significant influx of "GenAI" content on the internet. Existing methods for detecting GenAI content have progressed significantly with improved generalization performance on images from unseen generative models. Here, we leverage the capabilities of existing IQA models, which effectively capture the manifold of real images within a bandpass statistical space, to distinguish between real and AI-generated images. We investigate the generalization ability of these perceptual classifiers to the task of GenAI image detection and evaluate their robustness against various image degradations. Our results show that a two-layer network trained on the feature space of IQA models demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in detecting fake images across generative models, while maintaining significant robustness against image degradations.

Yixu Chen, Bowen Chen, Hai Wei et al.

This paper reports IEEE International Conference on Multimedia \& Expo (ICME) 2025 Grand Challenge on Generalizable HDR and SDR Video Quality Measurement. With the rapid development of video technology, especially High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) contents, the need for robust and generalizable Video Quality Assessment (VQA) methods has become increasingly demanded. Existing VQA models often struggle to deliver consistent performance across varying dynamic ranges, distortion types, and diverse content. This challenge was established to benchmark and promote VQA approaches capable of jointly handling HDR and SDR content. In the final evaluation phase, five teams submitted seven models along with technical reports to the Full Reference (FR) and No Reference (NR) tracks. Among them, four methods outperformed VMAF baseline, while the top-performing model achieved state-of-the-art performance, setting a new benchmark for generalizable video quality assessment.

Sandeep Mishra, Oindrila Saha, Alan C. Bovik

3D generation guided by text-to-image diffusion models enables the creation of visually compelling assets. However previous methods explore generation based on image or text. The boundaries of creativity are limited by what can be expressed through words or the images that can be sourced. We present YouDream, a method to generate high-quality anatomically controllable animals. YouDream is guided using a text-to-image diffusion model controlled by 2D views of a 3D pose prior. Our method generates 3D animals that are not possible to create using previous text-to-3D generative methods. Additionally, our method is capable of preserving anatomic consistency in the generated animals, an area where prior text-to-3D approaches often struggle. Moreover, we design a fully automated pipeline for generating commonly found animals. To circumvent the need for human intervention to create a 3D pose, we propose a multi-agent LLM that adapts poses from a limited library of animal 3D poses to represent the desired animal. A user study conducted on the outcomes of YouDream demonstrates the preference of the animal models generated by our method over others. Turntable results and code are released at https://youdream3d.github.io/

Sandeep Mishra, Oindrila Saha, Alan C. Bovik

Recent advancements in text-to-3D generation have demonstrated the ability to generate high quality 3D assets. However while generating animals these methods underperform, often portraying inaccurate anatomy and geometry. Towards ameliorating this defect, we present C3DAG, a novel pose-Controlled text-to-3D Animal Generation framework which generates a high quality 3D animal consistent with a given pose. We also introduce an automatic 3D shape creator tool, that allows dynamic pose generation and modification via a web-based tool, and that generates a 3D balloon animal using simple geometries. A NeRF is then initialized using this 3D shape using depth-controlled SDS. In the next stage, the pre-trained NeRF is fine-tuned using quadruped-pose-controlled SDS. The pipeline that we have developed not only produces geometrically and anatomically consistent results, but also renders highly controlled 3D animals, unlike prior methods which do not allow fine-grained pose control.

Avinab Saha, Yu-Chih Chen, Chase Davis et al.

We present the outcomes of a recent large-scale subjective study of Mobile Cloud Gaming Video Quality Assessment (MCG-VQA) on a diverse set of gaming videos. Rapid advancements in cloud services, faster video encoding technologies, and increased access to high-speed, low-latency wireless internet have all contributed to the exponential growth of the Mobile Cloud Gaming industry. Consequently, the development of methods to assess the quality of real-time video feeds to end-users of cloud gaming platforms has become increasingly important. However, due to the lack of a large-scale public Mobile Cloud Gaming Video dataset containing a diverse set of distorted videos with corresponding subjective scores, there has been limited work on the development of MCG-VQA models. Towards accelerating progress towards these goals, we created a new dataset, named the LIVE-Meta Mobile Cloud Gaming (LIVE-Meta-MCG) video quality database, composed of 600 landscape and portrait gaming videos, on which we collected 14,400 subjective quality ratings from an in-lab subjective study. Additionally, to demonstrate the usefulness of the new resource, we benchmarked multiple state-of-the-art VQA algorithms on the database. The new database will be made publicly available on our website: \url{https://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/LIVE-Meta-Mobile-Cloud-Gaming/index.html}