UGC-VQA: Benchmarking Blind Video Quality Assessment for User Generated Content

TL;DR

This paper introduces VIDEVAL, a new efficient no-reference video quality assessment model for user-generated content, validated through comprehensive benchmarking and achieving state-of-the-art results.

Contribution

The paper provides a thorough evaluation of existing VQA features and models, and develops a new fusion-based BVQA model, VIDEVAL, with improved performance and efficiency.

Findings

VIDEVAL achieves state-of-the-art performance in UGC-VQA.

VIDEVAL is more computationally efficient than existing models.

Benchmarking protocol facilitates future research in UGC-VQA.

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of user-generated content (UGC) videos shared and streamed over the Internet, thanks to the evolution of affordable and reliable consumer capture devices, and the tremendous popularity of social media platforms. Accordingly, there is a great need for accurate video quality assessment (VQA) models for UGC/consumer videos to monitor, control, and optimize this vast content. Blind quality prediction of in-the-wild videos is quite challenging, since the quality degradations of UGC content are unpredictable, complicated, and often commingled. Here we contribute to advancing the UGC-VQA problem by conducting a comprehensive evaluation of leading no-reference/blind VQA (BVQA) features and models on a fixed evaluation architecture, yielding new empirical insights on both subjective video quality studies and VQA model design. By employing a feature selection strategy on top of leading VQA model features, we are able to extract 60 of the 763 statistical features used by the leading models to create a new fusion-based BVQA model, which we dub the \textbf{VID}eo quality \textbf{EVAL}uator (VIDEVAL), that effectively balances the trade-off between VQA performance and efficiency. Our experimental results show that VIDEVAL achieves state-of-the-art performance at considerably lower computational cost than other leading models. Our study protocol also defines a reliable benchmark for the UGC-VQA problem, which we believe will facilitate further research on deep learning-based VQA modeling, as well as perceptually-optimized efficient UGC video processing, transcoding, and streaming. To promote reproducible research and public evaluation, an implementation of VIDEVAL has been made available online: \url{https://github.com/tu184044109/VIDEVAL_release}.