2019-01-16T16:11:39Z, Men, Hui, Lin, Hanhe, Hosu, Vlad, Maurer, Daniel, Bruhn, Andrés, Saupe, Dietmar

Current benchmarks for optical flow algorithms evaluate the estimation quality by comparing their predicted flow field with the ground truth, and additionally may compare interpolated frames, based on these predictions, with the correct frames from the actual image sequences. For the latter comparisons, objective measures such as mean square errors are applied. However, for applications like image interpolation, the expected user's quality of experience cannot be fully deduced from such simple quality measures. Therefore, we conducted a subjective quality assessment study by crowdsourcing for the interpolated images provided in one of the optical flow benchmarks, the Middlebury benchmark. We used paired comparisons with forced choice and reconstructed absolute quality scale values according to Thurstone's model using the classical least squares method. The results give rise to a re-ranking of 141 participating algorithms w.r.t. visual quality of interpolated frames mostly based on optical flow estimation. Our re-ranking result shows the necessity of visual quality assessment as another evaluation metric for optical flow and frame interpolation benchmarks.

2018-03-22T17:50:05Z, Lin, Hanhe, Hosu, Vlad, Saupe, Dietmar

The main challenge in applying state-of-the-art deep learning methods to predict image quality in-the-wild is the relatively small size of existing quality scored datasets. The reason for the lack of larger datasets is the massive resources required in generating diverse and publishable content. We present a new systematic and scalable approach to create large-scale, authentic and diverse image datasets for Image Quality Assessment (IQA). We show how we built an IQA database, KonIQ-10k, consisting of 10,073 images, on which we performed very large scale crowdsourcing experiments in order to obtain reliable quality ratings from 1,467 crowd workers (1.2 million ratings). We argue for its ecological validity by analyzing the diversity of the dataset, by comparing it to state-of-the-art IQA databases, and by checking the reliability of our user studies.