# Helping Visually Impaired People Take Better Quality Pictures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08066 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08066/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08218/) (2018)
- [Can Spatiotemporal 3D CNNs Retrace the History of 2D CNNs and ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09577/) (2017)
- [NIMA: Neural Image Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05424/) (2017)
- [Human uncertainty makes classification more robust](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07086/) (2019)
- [From Patches to Pictures (PaQ-2-PiQ): Mapping the Perceptual Space of Picture Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10088/) (2019)
- [Massive Online Crowdsourced Study of Subjective and Objective Picture Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02919/) (2015)
- [Patch-VQ: 'Patching Up' the Video Quality Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13544/) (2020)
- [Pyramid Feature Attention Network for Saliency detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00179/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Perceptual Quality Prediction on Authentically Distorted Images Using a Bag of Features Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04757/) (2016)
- [ORBIT: A Real-World Few-Shot Dataset for Teachable Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03841/) (2021)
- [Assessing Image Quality Issues for Real-World Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12511/) (2020)
- [KonIQ-10k: Towards an ecologically valid and large-scale IQA database](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08489/) (2018)
- [The Effect of Computer-Generated Descriptions on Photo-Sharing Experiences of People with Visual Impairments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01515/) (2018)
- [Image Distortion Detection using Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10881/) (2018)
- [No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Feature Fusion and Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03783/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Understanding How Blind Users Handle Object Recognition Errors: Strategies and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03303/) (2024)
- ["It's trained by non-disabled people": Evaluating How Image Quality Affects Product Captioning with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08917/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Perception-based image analysis technologies can be used to help visually impaired people take better quality pictures by providing automated guidance, thereby empowering them to interact more confidently on social media. The photographs taken by visually impaired users often suffer from one or both of two kinds of quality issues: technical quality (distortions), and semantic quality, such as framing and aesthetic composition. Here we develop tools to help them minimize occurrences of common technical distortions, such as blur, poor exposure, and noise. We do not address the complementary problems of semantic quality, leaving that aspect for future work. The problem of assessing and providing actionable feedback on the technical quality of pictures captured by visually impaired users is hard enough, owing to the severe, commingled distortions that often occur. To advance progress on the problem of analyzing and measuring the technical quality of visually impaired user-generated content (VI-UGC), we built a very large and unique subjective image quality and distortion dataset. This new perceptual resource, which we call the LIVE-Meta VI-UGC Database, contains 40K real-world distorted VI-UGC images and 40K patches, on which we recorded 2.7M human perceptual quality judgments and 2.7M distortion labels. Using this psychometric resource we also created an automatic blind picture quality and distortion predictor that learns local-to-global spatial quality relationships, achieving state-of-the-art prediction performance on VI-UGC pictures, significantly outperforming existing picture quality models on this unique class of distorted picture data. We also created a prototype feedback system that helps to guide users to mitigate quality issues and take better quality pictures, by creating a multi-task learning framework.