Capturing Co-existing Distortions in User-Generated Content for No-reference Video Quality Assessment

Video Quality Assessment (VQA), which aims to predict the perceptual quality of a video, has attracted raising attention with the rapid development of streaming media technology, such as Facebook, TikTok, Kwai, and so on. Compared with other sequence-based visual tasks (textite.g., action recognition), VQA faces two under-estimated challenges unresolved in User Generated Content (UGC) videos. textitFirst, it is not rare that several frames containing serious distortions (textite.g.,blocking, blurriness), can determine the perceptual quality of the whole video, while other sequence-based tasks require more frames of equal importance for representations. textitSecond, the perceptual quality of a video exhibits a multi-distortion distribution, due to the differences in the duration and probability of occurrence for various distortions. In order to solve the above challenges, we propose textitVisual Quality Transformer (VQT) to extract quality-related sparse features more efficiently. Methodologically, a Sparse Temporal Attention (STA) is proposed to sample keyframes by analyzing the temporal correlation between frames, which reduces the computational complexity from O(T2) to O(T log T). Structurally, a Multi-Pathway Temporal Network (MPTN) utilizes multiple STA modules with different degrees of sparsity in parallel, capturing co-existing distortions in a video. Experimentally, VQT demonstrates superior performance than many textitstate-of-the-art methods in three public no-reference VQA datasets. Furthermore, VQT shows better performance in four full-reference VQA datasets against widely-adopted industrial algorithms (textiti.e., VMAF and AVQT).