Towards Unified Video Quality Assessment

TL;DR

Unified-VQA introduces a versatile, interpretable video quality assessment framework that employs multiple experts and a diagnostic approach, outperforming existing methods across diverse video formats and artifacts.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel unified VQA model with a multi-expert architecture and diagnostic capabilities, enabling broad applicability and interpretability without retraining.

Findings

Outperforms 18 benchmark methods in VQA tasks

Provides interpretable artifact detection

Works across diverse video formats and resolutions

Abstract

Recent works in video quality assessment (VQA) typically employ monolithic models that typically predict a single quality score for each test video. These approaches cannot provide diagnostic, interpretable feedback, offering little insight into why the video quality is degraded. Most of them are also specialized, format-specific metrics rather than truly ``generic" solutions, as they are designed to learn a compromised representation from disparate perceptual domains. To address these limitations, this paper proposes Unified-VQA, a framework that provides a single, unified quality model applicable to various distortion types within multiple video formats by recasting generic VQA as a Diagnostic Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) problem. Unified-VQA employs multiple ``perceptual experts'' dedicated to distinct perceptual domains. A novel multi-proxy expert training strategy is designed to optimize each expert using a ranking-inspired loss, guided by the most suitable proxy metric for its domain. We also integrated a diagnostic multi-task head into this framework to generate a global quality score and an interpretable multi-dimensional artifact vector, which is optimized using a weakly-supervised learning strategy, leveraging the known properties of the large-scale training database generated for this work. With static model parameters (without retraining or fine-tuning), Unified-VQA demonstrates consistent and superior performance compared to over 18 benchmark methods for both generic VQA and diagnostic artifact detection tasks across 17 databases containing diverse streaming artifacts in HD, UHD, HDR and HFR formats. This work represents an important step towards practical, actionable, and interpretable video quality assessment.