Image Quality Assessment: From Human to Machine Preference

Chunyi Li, Yuan Tian, Xiaoyue Ling, Zicheng Zhang, Haodong Duan, Haoning Wu, Ziheng Jia, Xiaohong Liu, Xiongkuo Min, Guo Lu, Weisi Lin, Guangtao Zhai; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 7570-7581

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) based on human subjective preferences has undergone extensive research in the past decades. However, with the development of communication protocols, the visual data consumption volume of machines has gradually surpassed that of humans. For machines, the preference depends on downstream tasks such as segmentation and detection, rather than visual appeal. Considering the huge gap between human and machine vision systems, this paper proposes the topic: Image Quality Assessment for Machine Vision for the first time. Specifically, we (1) defined the subjective preferences of machines, including downstream tasks, test models, and evaluation metrics; (2) established the Machine Preference Database (MPD), which contains 2.25M fine-grained annotations and 30k reference/distorted image pair instances; (3) verified the performance of mainstream IQA algorithms on MPD. Experiments show that current IQA metrics are human-centric and cannot accurately characterize machine preferences. We sincerely hope that MPD can promote the evolution of IQA from human to machine preferences. Project page is on: https://github.com/lcysyzxdxc/MPD.