UPDA: Unsupervised Progressive Domain Adaptation for No-Reference Point Cloud Quality Assessment

While no-reference point cloud quality assessment (NR-PCQA) approaches have achieved significant progress over the past decade, their performance often degrades substantially when a distribution gap exists between the training (source domain) and testing (target domain) data. However, to date, limited attention has been paid to transferring NR-PCQA models across domains. To address this challenge, we propose the first unsupervised progressive domain adaptation (UPDA) framework for NR-PCQA, which introduces a two-stage coarse-to-fine alignment paradigm to address domain shifts. At the coarse-grained stage, a discrepancy-aware coarse-grained alignment method is designed to capture relative quality relationships between cross-domain samples through a novel quality-discrepancy-aware hybrid loss, circumventing the challenges of direct absolute feature alignment. At the fine-grained stage, a perception fusion fine-grained alignment approach with symmetric feature fusion is developed to identify domain-invariant features, while a conditional discriminator selectively enhances the transfer of quality-relevant features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed UPDA effectively enhances the performance of NR-PCQA methods in cross-domain scenarios, validating its practical applicability. The code is available at https://github.com/yokeno1/UPDA-main.

The Worse The Better: Content-Aware Viewpoint Generation Network for Projection-related Point Cloud Quality Assessment

Through experimental studies, however, we observed the instability of final predicted quality scores, which change significantly over different viewpoint settings. Inspired by the "wooden barrel theory", given the default content-independent viewpoints of existing projection-related PCQA approaches, this paper presents a novel content-aware viewpoint generation network (CAVGN) to learn better viewpoints by taking the distribution of geometric and attribute features of degraded point clouds into consideration. Firstly, the proposed CAVGN extracts multi-scale geometric and texture features of the entire input point cloud, respectively. Then, for each default content-independent viewpoint, the extracted geometric and texture features are refined to focus on its corresponding visible part of the input point cloud. Finally, the refined geometric and texture features are concatenated to generate an optimized viewpoint. To train the proposed CAVGN, we present a self-supervised viewpoint ranking network (SSVRN) to select the viewpoint with the worst quality projected image to construct a default-optimized viewpoint dataset, which consists of thousands of paired default viewpoints and corresponding optimized viewpoints. Experimental results show that the projection-related PCQA methods can achieve higher performance using the viewpoints generated by the proposed CAVGN.

No-reference geometry quality assessment for colorless point clouds via list-wise rank learning

Geometry quality assessment (GQA) of colorless point clouds is crucial for evaluating the performance of emerging point cloud-based solutions (e.g., watermarking, compression, and 3-Dimensional (3D) reconstruction). Unfortunately, existing objective GQA approaches are traditional full-reference metrics, whereas state-of-the-art learning-based point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) methods target both color and geometry distortions, neither of which are qualified for the no-reference GQA task. In addition, the lack of large-scale GQA datasets with subjective scores, which are always imprecise, biased, and inconsistent, also hinders the development of learning-based GQA metrics. Driven by these limitations, this paper proposes a no-reference geometry-only quality assessment approach based on list-wise rank learning, termed LRL-GQA, which comprises of a geometry quality assessment network (GQANet) and a list-wise rank learning network (LRLNet). The proposed LRL-GQA formulates the no-reference GQA as a list-wise rank problem, with the objective of directly optimizing the entire quality ordering. Specifically, a large dataset containing a variety of geometry-only distortions is constructed first, named LRL dataset, in which each sample is label-free but coupled with quality ranking information. Then, the GQANet is designed to capture intrinsic multi-scale patch-wise geometric features in order to predict a quality index for each point cloud. After that, the LRLNet leverages the LRL dataset and a likelihood loss to train the GQANet and ranks the input list of degraded point clouds according to their distortion levels. In addition, the pre-trained GQANet can be fine-tuned further to obtain absolute quality scores. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed no-reference LRL-GQA method compared with existing full-reference GQA metrics.