Ying Chen

Zicheng Zhang, Wei Wu, Wei Sun et al.

User-generated content (UGC) live videos are often bothered by various distortions during capture procedures and thus exhibit diverse visual qualities. Such source videos are further compressed and transcoded by media server providers before being distributed to end-users. Because of the flourishing of UGC live videos, effective video quality assessment (VQA) tools are needed to monitor and perceptually optimize live streaming videos in the distributing process. In this paper, we address \textbf{UGC Live VQA} problems by constructing a first-of-a-kind subjective UGC Live VQA database and developing an effective evaluation tool. Concretely, 418 source UGC videos are collected in real live streaming scenarios and 3,762 compressed ones at different bit rates are generated for the subsequent subjective VQA experiments. Based on the built database, we develop a \underline{M}ulti-\underline{D}imensional \underline{VQA} (\textbf{MD-VQA}) evaluator to measure the visual quality of UGC live videos from semantic, distortion, and motion aspects respectively. Extensive experimental results show that MD-VQA achieves state-of-the-art performance on both our UGC Live VQA database and existing compressed UGC VQA databases.

Zicheng Zhang, Wei Sun, Wei Wu et al.

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of image storage and transmission systems, in which image compression plays an important role. Generally speaking, image compression algorithms are developed to ensure good visual quality at limited bit rates. However, due to the different compression optimization methods, the compressed images may have different levels of quality, which needs to be evaluated quantificationally. Nowadays, the mainstream full-reference (FR) metrics are effective to predict the quality of compressed images at coarse-grained levels (the bit rates differences of compressed images are obvious), however, they may perform poorly for fine-grained compressed images whose bit rates differences are quite subtle. Therefore, to better improve the Quality of Experience (QoE) and provide useful guidance for compression algorithms, we propose a full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) method for compressed images of fine-grained levels. Specifically, the reference images and compressed images are first converted to $YCbCr$ color space. The gradient features are extracted from regions that are sensitive to compression artifacts. Then we employ the Log-Gabor transformation to further analyze the texture difference. Finally, the obtained features are fused into a quality score. The proposed method is validated on the fine-grained compression image quality assessment (FGIQA) database, which is especially constructed for assessing the quality of compressed images with close bit rates. The experimental results show that our metric outperforms mainstream FR-IQA metrics on the FGIQA database. We also test our method on other commonly used compression IQA databases and the results show that our method obtains competitive performance on the coarse-grained compression IQA databases as well.

Zhengyang Lu, Ying Chen

Single image super-resolution (SISR) is the task of inferring a high-resolution image from a single low-resolution image. Recent research on super-resolution has achieved great progress due to the development of deep convolutional neural networks in the field of computer vision. Existing super-resolution reconstruction methods have high performances in the criterion of Mean Square Error (MSE) but most methods fail to reconstruct an image with shape edges. To solve this problem, the mixed gradient error, which is composed by MSE and a weighted mean gradient error, is proposed in this work and applied to a modified U-net network as the loss function. The modified U-net removes all batch normalization layers and one of the convolution layers in each block. The operation reduces the number of parameters, and therefore accelerates the reconstruction. Compared with the existing image super-resolution algorithms, the proposed reconstruction method has better performance and time consumption. The experiments demonstrate that modified U-net network architecture with mixed gradient loss yields high-level results on three image datasets: SET14, BSD300, ICDAR2003. Code is available online.

Jiyao Liu, Jinjie Wei, Wanying Qu et al.

Medical Image Quality Assessment (IQA) serves as the first-mile safety gate for clinical AI, yet existing approaches remain constrained by scalar, score-based metrics and fail to reflect the descriptive, human-like reasoning process central to expert evaluation. To address this gap, we introduce MedQ-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that establishes a perception-reasoning paradigm for language-based evaluation of medical image quality with Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). MedQ-Bench defines two complementary tasks: (1) MedQ-Perception, which probes low-level perceptual capability via human-curated questions on fundamental visual attributes; and (2) MedQ-Reasoning, encompassing both no-reference and comparison reasoning tasks, aligning model evaluation with human-like reasoning on image quality. The benchmark spans five imaging modalities and over forty quality attributes, totaling 2,600 perceptual queries and 708 reasoning assessments, covering diverse image sources including authentic clinical acquisitions, images with simulated degradations via physics-based reconstructions, and AI-generated images. To evaluate reasoning ability, we propose a multi-dimensional judging protocol that assesses model outputs along four complementary axes. We further conduct rigorous human-AI alignment validation by comparing LLM-based judgement with radiologists. Our evaluation of 14 state-of-the-art MLLMs demonstrates that models exhibit preliminary but unstable perceptual and reasoning skills, with insufficient accuracy for reliable clinical use. These findings highlight the need for targeted optimization of MLLMs in medical IQA. We hope that MedQ-Bench will catalyze further exploration and unlock the untapped potential of MLLMs for medical image quality evaluation.

Zi Li, Ying Chen, Zeli Chen et al.

In the radiation therapy of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), clinicians typically delineate the gross tumor volume (GTV) using non-contrast planning computed tomography to ensure accurate radiation dose delivery. However, the low contrast between tumors and adjacent normal tissues necessitates that radiation oncologists manually delineate the tumors, often relying on diagnostic MRI for guidance. % In this study, we propose a novel approach to directly segment NPC gross tumors on non-contrast planning CT images, circumventing potential registration errors when aligning MRI or MRI-derived tumor masks to planning CT. To address the low contrast issues between tumors and adjacent normal structures in planning CT, we introduce a 3D Semantic Asymmetry Tumor segmentation (SATs) method. Specifically, we posit that a healthy nasopharyngeal region is characteristically bilaterally symmetric, whereas the emergence of nasopharyngeal carcinoma disrupts this symmetry. Then, we propose a Siamese contrastive learning segmentation framework that minimizes the voxel-wise distance between original and flipped areas without tumor and encourages a larger distance between original and flipped areas with tumor. Thus, our approach enhances the sensitivity of features to semantic asymmetries. % Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SATs achieves the leading NPC GTV segmentation performance in both internal and external testing, \emph{e.g.}, with at least 2\% absolute Dice score improvement and 12\% average distance error reduction when compared to other state-of-the-art methods in the external testing.

Zhuofei Huang, Jianlin Liu, Shang Xu et al.

Multi-view stereo depth estimation based on cost volume usually works better than self-supervised monocular depth estimation except for moving objects and low-textured surfaces. So in this paper, we propose a multi-frame depth estimation framework which monocular depth can be refined continuously by multi-frame sequential constraints, leveraging a Bayesian fusion layer within several iterations. Both monocular and multi-view networks can be trained with no depth supervision. Our method also enhances the interpretability when combining monocular estimation with multi-view cost volume. Detailed experiments show that our method surpasses state-of-the-art unsupervised methods utilizing single or multiple frames at test time on KITTI benchmark.