# KonIQ-10k: An ecologically valid database for deep learning of blind image quality assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.06180 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06180/

## Key facts

- Cited by 355 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 355)

- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Exploring Video Quality Assessment on User Generated Contents from Aesthetic and Technical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04894/) (2022)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment via Vision-Language Correspondence: A Multitask Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14968/) (2023)
- [Q-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Foundation Models on Low-level Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14181/) (2023)
- [TOPIQ: A Top-down Approach from Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03060/) (2023)
- [FreeU: Free Lunch in Diffusion U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11497/) (2023)
- [FAST-VQA: Efficient End-to-end Video Quality Assessment with Fragment Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02595/) (2022)
- [No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Transformers, Relative Ranking, and Self-Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06858/) (2021)
- [Q-Instruct: Improving Low-level Visual Abilities for Multi-modality Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06783/) (2023)
- [AGIQA-3K: An Open Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04717/) (2023)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Regress Accurate Image Quality Scores using Score Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11561/) (2025)
- [A Deep Learning based No-reference Quality Assessment Model for UGC Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14047/) (2022)
- [RAPIQUE: Rapid and Accurate Video Quality Prediction of User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10955/) (2021)
- [Q-Insight: Understanding Image Quality via Visual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22679/) (2025)
- [Blindly Assess Quality of In-the-Wild Videos via Quality-aware Pre-training and Motion Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08505/) (2021)
- [Re-IQA: Unsupervised Learning for Image Quality Assessment in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00451/) (2023)
- [Image Quality Assessment using Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13266/) (2021)
- [Mini-InternVL: A Flexible-Transfer Pocket Multimodal Model with 5% Parameters and 90% Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16261/) (2024)
- [X-Portrait: Expressive Portrait Animation with Hierarchical Motion Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15931/) (2024)
- [Towards Open-ended Visual Quality Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16641/) (2024)
- [VisualQuality-R1: Reasoning-Induced Image Quality Assessment via Reinforcement Learning to Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14460/) (2025)
- [Content-based Unrestricted Adversarial Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10665/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Image Quality Assessment via Teaching Large Multimodal Model to Compare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19298/) (2024)
- [VILA: Learning Image Aesthetics from User Comments with Vision-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14302/) (2023)
- [AesBench: An Expert Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models on Image Aesthetics Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08276/) (2024)
- [Personalized Image Aesthetics Assessment with Rich Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16754/) (2022)
- [A Perceptual Quality Assessment Exploration for AIGC Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12618/) (2023)
- [Perceptual Image Quality Assessment with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14730/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning methods for image quality assessment (IQA) are limited due to the small size of existing datasets. Extensive datasets require substantial resources both for generating publishable content and annotating it accurately. We present a systematic and scalable approach to creating KonIQ-10k, the largest IQA dataset to date, consisting of 10,073 quality scored images. It is the first in-the-wild database aiming for ecological validity, concerning the authenticity of distortions, the diversity of content, and quality-related indicators. Through the use of crowdsourcing, we obtained 1.2 million reliable quality ratings from 1,459 crowd workers, paving the way for more general IQA models. We propose a novel, deep learning model (KonCept512), to show an excellent generalization beyond the test set (0.921 SROCC), to the current state-of-the-art database LIVE-in-the-Wild (0.825 SROCC). The model derives its core performance from the InceptionResNet architecture, being trained at a higher resolution than previous models (512x384). Correlation analysis shows that KonCept512 performs similar to having 9 subjective scores for each test image.