NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Quality Assessment: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Shortform UGC Video Quality Assessment (S-UGC VQA), where various excellent solutions are submitted and evaluated on the collected dataset KVQ from popular short-form video platform, i.e., Kuaishou/Kwai Platform. The KVQ database is divided into three parts, including 2926 videos for training, 420 videos for validation, and 854 videos for testing. The purpose is to build new benchmarks and advance the development of S-UGC VQA. The competition had 200 participants and 13 teams submitted valid solutions for the final testing phase. The proposed solutions achieved state-of-the-art performances for S-UGC VQA. The project can be found at https://github.com/lixinustc/KVQChallenge-CVPR-NTIRE2024.

THQA: A Perceptual Quality Assessment Database for Talking Heads

In the realm of media technology, digital humans have gained prominence due to rapid advancements in computer technology. However, the manual modeling and control required for the majority of digital humans pose significant obstacles to efficient development. The speech-driven methods offer a novel avenue for manipulating the mouth shape and expressions of digital humans. Despite the proliferation of driving methods, the quality of many generated talking head (TH) videos remains a concern, impacting user visual experiences. To tackle this issue, this paper introduces the Talking Head Quality Assessment (THQA) database, featuring 800 TH videos generated through 8 diverse speech-driven methods. Extensive experiments affirm the THQA database's richness in character and speech features. Subsequent subjective quality assessment experiments analyze correlations between scoring results and speech-driven methods, ages, and genders. In addition, experimental results show that mainstream image and video quality assessment methods have limitations for the THQA database, underscoring the imperative for further research to enhance TH video quality assessment. The THQA database is publicly accessible at https://github.com/zyj-2000/THQA.

How is Visual Attention Influenced by Text Guidance? Database and Model

The analysis and prediction of visual attention have long been crucial tasks in the fields of computer vision and image processing. In practical applications, images are generally accompanied by various text descriptions, however, few studies have explored the influence of text descriptions on visual attention, let alone developed visual saliency prediction models considering text guidance. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on text-guided image saliency (TIS) from both subjective and objective perspectives. Specifically, we construct a TIS database named SJTU-TIS, which includes 1200 text-image pairs and the corresponding collected eye-tracking data. Based on the established SJTU-TIS database, we analyze the influence of various text descriptions on visual attention. Then, to facilitate the development of saliency prediction models considering text influence, we construct a benchmark for the established SJTU-TIS database using state-of-the-art saliency models. Finally, considering the effect of text descriptions on visual attention, while most existing saliency models ignore this impact, we further propose a text-guided saliency (TGSal) prediction model, which extracts and integrates both image features and text features to predict the image saliency under various text-description conditions. Our proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art saliency models on both the SJTU-TIS database and the pure image saliency databases in terms of various evaluation metrics. The SJTU-TIS database and the code of the proposed TGSal model will be released at: https://github.com/IntMeGroup/TGSal.

AIGIQA-20K: A Large Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment

With the rapid advancements in AI-Generated Content (AIGC), AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) have been widely applied in entertainment, education, and social media. However, due to the significant variance in quality among different AIGIs, there is an urgent need for models that consistently match human subjective ratings. To address this issue, we organized a challenge towards AIGC quality assessment on NTIRE 2024 that extensively considers 15 popular generative models, utilizing dynamic hyper-parameters (including classifier-free guidance, iteration epochs, and output image resolution), and gather subjective scores that consider perceptual quality and text-to-image alignment altogether comprehensively involving 21 subjects. This approach culminates in the creation of the largest fine-grained AIGI subjective quality database to date with 20,000 AIGIs and 420,000 subjective ratings, known as AIGIQA-20K. Furthermore, we conduct benchmark experiments on this database to assess the correspondence between 16 mainstream AIGI quality models and human perception. We anticipate that this large-scale quality database will inspire robust quality indicators for AIGIs and propel the evolution of AIGC for vision. The database is released on https://www.modelscope.cn/datasets/lcysyzxdxc/AIGCQA-30K-Image.

AIGCOIQA2024: Perceptual Quality Assessment of AI Generated Omnidirectional Images

In recent years, the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has attracted widespread attention. Among the AIGC, AI generated omnidirectional images hold significant potential for Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications, hence omnidirectional AIGC techniques have also been widely studied. AI-generated omnidirectional images exhibit unique distortions compared to natural omnidirectional images, however, there is no dedicated Image Quality Assessment (IQA) criteria for assessing them. This study addresses this gap by establishing a large-scale AI generated omnidirectional image IQA database named AIGCOIQA2024 and constructing a comprehensive benchmark. We first generate 300 omnidirectional images based on 5 AIGC models utilizing 25 text prompts. A subjective IQA experiment is conducted subsequently to assess human visual preferences from three perspectives including quality, comfortability, and correspondence. Finally, we conduct a benchmark experiment to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art IQA models on our database. The database will be released to facilitate future research.

Subjective-Aligned Dataset and Metric for Text-to-Video Quality Assessment

With the rapid development of generative models, Artificial Intelligence-Generated Contents (AIGC) have exponentially increased in daily lives. Among them, Text-to-Video (T2V) generation has received widespread attention. Though many T2V models have been released for generating high perceptual quality videos, there is still lack of a method to evaluate the quality of these videos quantitatively. To solve this issue, we establish the largest-scale Text-to-Video Quality Assessment DataBase (T2VQA-DB) to date. The dataset is composed of 10,000 videos generated by 9 different T2V models. We also conduct a subjective study to obtain each video's corresponding mean opinion score. Based on T2VQA-DB, we propose a novel transformer-based model for subjective-aligned Text-to-Video Quality Assessment (T2VQA). The model extracts features from text-video alignment and video fidelity perspectives, then it leverages the ability of a large language model to give the prediction score. Experimental results show that T2VQA outperforms existing T2V metrics and SOTA video quality assessment models. Quantitative analysis indicates that T2VQA is capable of giving subjective-align predictions, validating its effectiveness. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/QMME/T2VQA.

Subjective-Aligned Dateset and Metric for Text-to-Video Quality Assessment

With the rapid development of generative models, Artificial Intelligence-Generated Contents (AIGC) have exponentially increased in daily lives. Among them, Text-to-Video (T2V) generation has received widespread attention. Though many T2V models have been released for generating high perceptual quality videos, there is still lack of a method to evaluate the quality of these videos quantitatively. To solve this issue, we establish the largest-scale Text-to-Video Quality Assessment DataBase (T2VQA-DB) to date. The dataset is composed of 10,000 videos generated by 9 different T2V models. We also conduct a subjective study to obtain each video's corresponding mean opinion score. Based on T2VQA-DB, we propose a novel transformer-based model for subjective-aligned Text-to-Video Quality Assessment (T2VQA). The model extracts features from text-video alignment and video fidelity perspectives, then it leverages the ability of a large language model to give the prediction score. Experimental results show that T2VQA outperforms existing T2V metrics and SOTA video quality assessment models. Quantitative analysis indicates that T2VQA is capable of giving subjective-align predictions, validating its effectiveness. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/QMME/T2VQA.

Perceptual Video Quality Assessment: A Survey

Perceptual video quality assessment plays a vital role in the field of video processing due to the existence of quality degradations introduced in various stages of video signal acquisition, compression, transmission and display. With the advancement of internet communication and cloud service technology, video content and traffic are growing exponentially, which further emphasizes the requirement for accurate and rapid assessment of video quality. Therefore, numerous subjective and objective video quality assessment studies have been conducted over the past two decades for both generic videos and specific videos such as streaming, user-generated content (UGC), 3D, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), high frame rate (HFR), audio-visual, etc. This survey provides an up-to-date and comprehensive review of these video quality assessment studies. Specifically, we first review the subjective video quality assessment methodologies and databases, which are necessary for validating the performance of video quality metrics. Second, the objective video quality assessment algorithms for general purposes are surveyed and concluded according to the methodologies utilized in the quality measures. Third, we overview the objective video quality assessment measures for specific applications and emerging topics. Finally, the performances of the state-of-the-art video quality assessment measures are compared and analyzed. This survey provides a systematic overview of both classical works and recent progresses in the realm of video quality assessment, which can help other researchers quickly access the field and conduct relevant research.

Q-Refine: A Perceptual Quality Refiner for AI-Generated Image

With the rapid evolution of the Text-to-Image (T2I) model in recent years, their unsatisfactory generation result has become a challenge. However, uniformly refining AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) of different qualities not only limited optimization capabilities for low-quality AIGIs but also brought negative optimization to high-quality AIGIs. To address this issue, a quality-award refiner named Q-Refine is proposed. Based on the preference of the Human Visual System (HVS), Q-Refine uses the Image Quality Assessment (IQA) metric to guide the refining process for the first time, and modify images of different qualities through three adaptive pipelines. Experimental shows that for mainstream T2I models, Q-Refine can perform effective optimization to AIGIs of different qualities. It can be a general refiner to optimize AIGIs from both fidelity and aesthetic quality levels, thus expanding the application of the T2I generation models.

Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels

The explosion of visual content available online underscores the requirement for an accurate machine assessor to robustly evaluate scores across diverse types of visual contents. While recent studies have demonstrated the exceptional potentials of large multi-modality models (LMMs) on a wide range of related fields, in this work, we explore how to teach them for visual rating aligned with human opinions. Observing that human raters only learn and judge discrete text-defined levels in subjective studies, we propose to emulate this subjective process and teach LMMs with text-defined rating levels instead of scores. The proposed Q-Align achieves state-of-the-art performance on image quality assessment (IQA), image aesthetic assessment (IAA), as well as video quality assessment (VQA) tasks under the original LMM structure. With the syllabus, we further unify the three tasks into one model, termed the OneAlign. In our experiments, we demonstrate the advantage of the discrete-level-based syllabus over direct-score-based variants for LMMs. Our code and the pre-trained weights are released at https://github.com/Q-Future/Q-Align.