# CONVIQT: Contrastive Video Quality Estimator

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.14713 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14713/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 93 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [Spatiotemporal Contrastive Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03800/) (2020)
- [Discriminative Unsupervised Feature Learning with Exemplar Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.6909/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Sorting Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01246/) (2017)
- [A Large-Scale Study on Unsupervised Spatiotemporal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14558/) (2021)
- [Colorization as a Proxy Task for Visual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04044/) (2017)
- [Video Representation Learning by Dense Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04656/) (2019)
- [Quality Assessment of In-the-Wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00375/) (2019)
- [VideoMoCo: Contrastive Video Representation Learning with Temporally Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05905/) (2021)
- [Patch-VQ: 'Patching Up' the Video Quality Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13544/) (2020)
- [UGC-VQA: Benchmarking Blind Video Quality Assessment for User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14354/) (2020)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Blind Image Quality Assessment in the Laboratory and Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13983/) (2020)
- [Large-Scale Study of Perceptual Video Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01761/) (2018)
- [YouTube UGC Dataset for Video Compression Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06457/) (2019)
- [Video Playback Rate Perception for Self-supervisedSpatio-Temporal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11476/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [IQAGPT: Image Quality Assessment with Vision-language and ChatGPT Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15663/) (2023)
- [HIDRO-VQA: High Dynamic Range Oracle for Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11059/) (2023)
- [HVS Revisited: A Comprehensive Video Quality Assessment Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04158/) (2022)
- [Generalizable Video Quality Assessment via Weak-to-Strong Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03631/) (2025)
- [ReLaX-VQA: Residual Fragment and Layer Stack Extraction for Enhancing Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11496/) (2024)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Linear Prediction as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05986/) (2023)
- [RMT-BVQA: Recurrent Memory Transformer-based Blind Video Quality Assessment for Enhanced Video Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08621/) (2024)
- [MVAD: A Multiple Visual Artifact Detector for Video Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00212/) (2024)
- [BVI-UGC: A Video Quality Database for User-Generated Content Transcoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07171/) (2024)
- [DIVA-VQA: Detecting Inter-frame Variations in UGC Video Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10605/) (2025)
- [CAMP-VQA: Caption-Embedded Multimodal Perception for No-Reference Quality Assessment of Compressed Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07290/) (2025)
- [Subjective and Objective Analysis of Indian Social Media Video Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02794/) (2024)
- [Joint Quality Assessment and Example-Guided Image Processing by Disentangling Picture Appearance from Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13484/) (2024)
- [A review on Machine Learning based User-Centric Multimedia Streaming Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15801/) (2024)
- [Scene Perceived Image Perceptual Score (SPIPS): combining global and local perception for image quality assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17234/) (2025)
- [CGVQM+D: Computer Graphics Video Quality Metric and Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11546/) (2025)
- [Seeing Beyond 8bits: Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of HDR-UGC Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00938/) (2026)
- [Learning Perceptual Representations for Gaming NR-VQA with Multi-Task FR Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11903/) (2026)
- [FDIM: A Feature-distance-based Generic Video Quality Metric for Versatile Codecs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24123/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Perceptual video quality assessment (VQA) is an integral component of many streaming and video sharing platforms. Here we consider the problem of learning perceptually relevant video quality representations in a self-supervised manner. Distortion type identification and degradation level determination is employed as an auxiliary task to train a deep learning model containing a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that extracts spatial features, as well as a recurrent unit that captures temporal information. The model is trained using a contrastive loss and we therefore refer to this training framework and resulting model as CONtrastive VIdeo Quality EstimaTor (CONVIQT). During testing, the weights of the trained model are frozen, and a linear regressor maps the learned features to quality scores in a no-reference (NR) setting. We conduct comprehensive evaluations of the proposed model on multiple VQA databases by analyzing the correlations between model predictions and ground-truth quality ratings, and achieve competitive performance when compared to state-of-the-art NR-VQA models, even though it is not trained on those databases. Our ablation experiments demonstrate that the learned representations are highly robust and generalize well across synthetic and realistic distortions. Our results indicate that compelling representations with perceptual bearing can be obtained using self-supervised learning. The implementations used in this work have been made available at https://github.com/pavancm/CONVIQT.