# From Patches to Pictures (PaQ-2-PiQ): Mapping the Perceptual Space of Picture Quality

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.10088 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10088/

## Key facts

- Cited by 223 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 223)

- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (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)
- [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)
- [RAPIQUE: Rapid and Accurate Video Quality Prediction of User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10955/) (2021)
- [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)
- [ARNIQA: Learning Distortion Manifold for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14918/) (2023)
- [Towards Open-ended Visual Quality Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16641/) (2024)
- [Contrastive Semi-supervised Learning for Underwater Image Restoration via Reliable Bank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09101/) (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)
- [A Perceptual Quality Assessment Exploration for AIGC Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12618/) (2023)
- [Neighbourhood Representative Sampling for Efficient End-to-end Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05357/) (2022)
- [Data-Efficient Image Quality Assessment with Attention-Panel Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04952/) (2023)
- [Towards Explainable In-the-Wild Video Quality Assessment: A Database and a Language-Prompted Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12726/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Study of Multimodal Large Language Models for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10854/) (2024)
- [DisCoVQA: Temporal Distortion-Content Transformers for Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09853/) (2022)
- [A-Bench: Are LMMs Masters at Evaluating AI-generated Images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03070/) (2024)
- [Analysis of Video Quality Datasets via Design of Minimalistic Video Quality Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13981/) (2023)
- [Continual Learning for Blind Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09717/) (2021)
- [Parrot: Pareto-optimal Multi-Reward Reinforcement Learning Framework for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05675/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Blind or no-reference (NR) perceptual picture quality prediction is a difficult, unsolved problem of great consequence to the social and streaming media industries that impacts billions of viewers daily. Unfortunately, popular NR prediction models perform poorly on real-world distorted pictures. To advance progress on this problem, we introduce the largest (by far) subjective picture quality database, containing about 40000 real-world distorted pictures and 120000 patches, on which we collected about 4M human judgments of picture quality. Using these picture and patch quality labels, we built deep region-based architectures that learn to produce state-of-the-art global picture quality predictions as well as useful local picture quality maps. Our innovations include picture quality prediction architectures that produce global-to-local inferences as well as local-to-global inferences (via feedback).