# A Causally Grounded Taxonomy for Image Degradation Robustness Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15906 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15906/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2026.

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

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [Benchmarking Robustness in Object Detection: Autonomous Driving when Winter is Coming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07484/) (2019)
- [LLVIP: A Visible-infrared Paired Dataset for Low-light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10831/) (2021)
- [3D Common Corruptions and Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01441/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Robustness of 3D Object Detection to Common Corruptions in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11040/) (2023)
- [On Interaction Between Augmentations and Corruptions in Natural Corruption Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11273/) (2021)
- [ARNIQA: Learning Distortion Manifold for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14918/) (2023)
- [Multispectral Fusion for Object Detection with Cyclic Fuse-and-Refine Blocks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12664/) (2020)
- [COCO-O: A Benchmark for Object Detectors under Natural Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12730/) (2023)
- [Going the Extra Mile in Face Image Quality Assessment: A Novel Database and Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04904/) (2022)
- [Towards Building Self-Aware Object Detectors via Reliable Uncertainty Quantification and Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00934/) (2023)
- [UHD-IQA Benchmark Database: Pushing the Boundaries of Blind Photo Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17472/) (2024)
- [HazyDet: Open-Source Benchmark for Drone-View Object Detection with Depth-Cues in Hazy Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19833/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Image Quality Assessment: Insights, Analysis, and Future Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08540/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking performance of object detection under image distortions in an uncontrolled environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15999/) (2022)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment: A Brief Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16551/) (2023)
- [WiSE-OD: Benchmarking Robustness in Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18925/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [BRUCE: Benchmarking Robustness Under Corruption Escalation for Scientific Vision-Language Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07742/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image degradations can occur during acquisition, processing, and transmission, altering visual appearance and affecting downstream vision tasks. They are studied in several communities, including synthetic corruption benchmarks for robustness evaluation, perceptual image quality assessment, and physically grounded analyses of imaging systems or real camera failures. Although these areas address closely related phenomena, they often use incompatible grouping schemes and backend specific severity definitions, making results difficult to compare across datasets, degradation sources, and tasks. We propose a causally grounded framework for organizing and interpreting image degradations across these settings. Instead of introducing new degradations or redefining existing benchmarks, we provide an interpretive representation and measurement layer that makes implicit assumptions explicit. Each degradation is described along two orthogonal axes: its dominant causal source in the imaging pipeline (environment, sensor/optics, ISP/renderer/codec, or transfer/system), and its resulting perceptual effect. This dual axis abstraction yields a compact taxonomy spanning algorithmic corruptions, perceptual distortions, and physically motivated imaging artifacts. To address inconsistent severity semantics without changing existing implementations, we introduce a lightweight severity measurement layer. For every degradation and each native severity level of a given backend, we quantify degradation strength using full reference image quality metrics: PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS. This makes severity observable and comparable across sources while preserving native parameterizations. We demonstrate the framework through COCO Degradation, a taxonomy aligned benchmark for evaluating object detector robustness under diverse imaging conditions.