NTIRE 2025 Challenge on UGC Video Enhancement: Methods and Results

TL;DR

The NTIRE 2025 Challenge on UGC Video Enhancement aimed to develop algorithms to improve the quality of user-generated videos suffering from real-world degradations, with evaluation based on crowdsourced subjective assessments.

Contribution

This paper provides an overview of the challenge, including dataset creation, evaluation methodology, participant solutions, and insights into current trends in UGC video enhancement.

Findings

Over 25 teams participated, with 7 passing final verification.

Subjective assessments involved over 8000 crowd votes.

The challenge results highlight effective strategies and current state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on UGC Video Enhancement. The challenge constructed a set of 150 user-generated content videos without reference ground truth, which suffer from real-world degradations such as noise, blur, faded colors, compression artifacts, etc. The goal of the participants was to develop an algorithm capable of improving the visual quality of such videos. Given the widespread use of UGC on short-form video platforms, this task holds substantial practical importance. The evaluation was based on subjective quality assessment in crowdsourcing, obtaining votes from over 8000 assessors. The challenge attracted more than 25 teams submitting solutions, 7 of which passed the final phase with source code verification. The outcomes may provide insights into the state-of-the-art in UGC video enhancement and highlight emerging trends and effective strategies in this evolving research area. All data, including the processed videos and subjective comparison votes and scores, is made publicly available at https://github.com/msu-video-group/NTIRE25_UGC_Video_Enhancement.