Quality assessment of images undergoing multiple distortion stages
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In practical media distribution systems, visual content often undergoes multiple stages of quality degradations along the delivery chain between the source and destination. By contrast, current image quality assessment (IQA) models are typically validated on image databases with a single distortion stage. In this work, we construct two large-scale image databases that are composed of more than 2 million images undergoing multiple stages of distortions and examine how state-of-the-art IQA algorithms behave over distortion stages. Our results suggest that the performance of existing IQA models degrades rapidly with distortion stages, especially when the distortion types of different stages vary. We also find that full-reference and no-reference frameworks, though both readily applicable, have major drawbacks at predicting the quality of images at middle distortion stages. However, when the quality level of the previous stage is accessible, significantly improved quality prediction performance may be achieved. This study points out a new avenue of degraded-reference IQA research that is both practically desirable and technically challenging.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".