Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment for in-the-Wild Computer Graphics Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces a large-scale in-the-wild CGI quality assessment database and proposes a deep learning-based no-reference IQA model that outperforms existing methods in evaluating computer graphics image quality.

Contribution

It creates the first extensive CGIQA database and develops a novel deep learning model tailored for in-the-wild CGIs, addressing limitations of natural scene image metrics.

Findings

The proposed model achieves superior accuracy over state-of-the-art methods.

The CGIQA-6k database provides a valuable resource for future research.

Deep learning effectively captures both distortion and aesthetic quality in CGIs.

Abstract

Computer graphics images (CGIs) are artificially generated by means of computer programs and are widely perceived under various scenarios, such as games, streaming media, etc. In practice, the quality of CGIs consistently suffers from poor rendering during production, inevitable compression artifacts during the transmission of multimedia applications, and low aesthetic quality resulting from poor composition and design. However, few works have been dedicated to dealing with the challenge of computer graphics image quality assessment (CGIQA). Most image quality assessment (IQA) metrics are developed for natural scene images (NSIs) and validated on databases consisting of NSIs with synthetic distortions, which are not suitable for in-the-wild CGIs. To bridge the gap between evaluating the quality of NSIs and CGIs, we construct a large-scale in-the-wild CGIQA database consisting of 6,000 CGIs (CGIQA-6k) and carry out the subjective experiment in a well-controlled laboratory environment to obtain the accurate perceptual ratings of the CGIs. Then, we propose an effective deep learning-based no-reference (NR) IQA model by utilizing both distortion and aesthetic quality representation. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms all other state-of-the-art NR IQA methods on the constructed CGIQA-6k database and other CGIQA-related databases. The database is released at https://github.com/zzc-1998/CGIQA6K.