# Image Quality Assessment for Machines: Paradigm, Large-scale Database, and Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19850 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19850/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [Improving Transferability of Adversarial Examples with Input Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06978/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine vision systems (MVS) are intrinsically vulnerable to performance degradation under adverse visual conditions. To address this, we propose a machine-centric image quality assessment (MIQA) framework that quantifies the impact of image degradations on MVS performance. We establish an MIQA paradigm encompassing the end-to-end assessment workflow. To support this, we construct a machine-centric image quality database (MIQD-2.5M), comprising 2.5 million samples that capture distinctive degradation responses in both consistency and accuracy metrics, spanning 75 vision models, 250 degradation types, and three representative vision tasks. We further propose a region-aware MIQA (RA-MIQA) model to evaluate MVS visual quality through fine-grained spatial degradation analysis. Extensive experiments benchmark the proposed RA-MIQA against seven human visual system (HVS)-based IQA metrics and five retrained classical backbones. Results demonstrate RA-MIQA's superior performance in multiple dimensions, e.g., achieving SRCC gains of 13.56% on consistency and 13.37% on accuracy for image classification, while also revealing task-specific degradation sensitivities. Critically, HVS-based metrics prove inadequate for MVS quality prediction, while even specialized MIQA models struggle with background degradations, accuracy-oriented estimation, and subtle distortions. This study can advance MVS reliability and establish foundations for machine-centric image processing and optimization. The model and code are available at: https://github.com/XiaoqiWang/MIQA.