User Generated Content (UGC) refers to media generated by users for end-consumers that represent most of the media exchange on social media. UGC is subject to acquisition and transmission limitations that disable access to the pristine, i.e., perfect source content. Evaluating their quality, especially with current pre- and post-processing algorithms or filters, is a major issue for most off-the-shelf full-reference quality metrics. We propose to conduct a benchmark on existing full-reference, non-reference, and aesthetic quality metrics for UGC with special effects. We aim to identify the challenges posed by both UGC and filtering. We then propose a new combination of metrics tailored to enhanced and filtered UGC, which reaches a trade-off between complexity and accuracy.

With the proliferation of various gaming technology, services, game styles, and platforms, multi-dimensional aesthetic assessment of the gaming contents is becoming more and more important for the gaming industry. Depending on the diverse needs of diversified game players, game designers, graphical developers, etc. in particular conditions, multi-modal aesthetic assessment is required to consider different aesthetic dimensions/perspectives. Since there are different underlying relationships between different aesthetic dimensions, e.g., between the ‘Colorfulness’ and ‘Color Harmony’, it could be advantageous to leverage effective information attached in multiple relevant dimensions. To this end, we solve this problem via multi-task learning. Our inclination is to seek and learn the correlations between different aesthetic relevant dimensions to further boost the generalization performance in predicting all the aesthetic dimensions. Therefore, the ‘bottleneck’ of obtaining good predictions with limited labeled data for one individual dimension could be unplugged by harnessing complementary sources of other dimensions, i.e., augment the training data indirectly by sharing training information across dimensions. According to experimental results, the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art aesthetic metrics significantly in predicting four gaming aesthetic dimensions.