# FunPiQ: A New Benchmark for Pixel-Level Quality Assessment in Fundus Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25915 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25915/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [Positive-Unlabeled Learning with Non-Negative Risk Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00593/) (2017)
- [Evaluation of Retinal Image Quality Assessment Networks in Different Color-spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05345/) (2019)
- [UniVAD: A Training-free Unified Model for Few-shot Visual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03342/) (2024)
- [EFIQA: Explainable Fundus Image Quality Assessment via Anatomical Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20108/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Color fundus photography (CFP) is the most common ophthalmic imaging modality for large-scale screening. However, it is highly susceptible to degradations, making robust fundus image quality assessment (FIQA) crucial. The criteria for what constitutes high-quality at the image level vary across clinical tasks, making FIQA dependent on expert knowledge. This motivated the development of automated methods and datasets. While existing datasets aim to standardize image-level quality, their criteria often differ. Furthermore, image-level labels preclude the quantitative evaluation of localized degradations, which is essential for trustworthy FIQA. We argue that pixel-level FIQA based on anatomical visibility represents a more task-agnostic, explainable approach. In this work, we introduce FunPiQ, the first FIQA benchmark to provide pixel-level quality annotations. In addition, we propose EFIQA-CP, an explainable-by-design (EBD) method that uses quality pseudo-labels based on anatomical visibility to train a CNN via Non-Negative Positive-Unlabeled learning. Extensive evaluations of classification methods with post-hoc explanations, anomaly detection methods, and EBD methods demonstrate the superior performance of the last and, particularly, of EFIQA-CP.