As Augmented Reality (AR) technology continues to gain traction in various sectors, ensuring a superior user experience has become an essential challenge for both academic researchers and industry professionals. However, the task of automatically predicting the quality of AR images remains difficult due to several inherent challenges, particularly the issue of visual confusion arising from the overlap of virtual and real-world elements. This paper introduces transformAR, a novel and efficient transformer-based framework designed to objectively assess the quality of AR images. The proposed model uses pre-trained vision transformers to capture content features from AR images, calculates distance vectors to measure the impact of distortions, and employs cross-attention-based decoders to effectively model the perceptual qualities of the AR images. Additionally, the training framework uses regularization techniques and label smoothing-like method to reduce the risk of overfitting. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that transformAR outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, offering a more reliable and scalable solution for AR image quality assessment.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a major immersive media technology that enriches our perception of reality by overlaying digital content (the foreground) onto physical environments (the background). It has far-reaching applications, from entertainment and gaming to education, healthcare, and industrial training. Nevertheless, challenges such as visual confusion and classical distortions can result in user discomfort when using the technology. Evaluating AR quality of experience becomes essential to measure user satisfaction and engagement, facilitating the refinement necessary for creating immersive and robust experiences. Though the scarcity of data and the distinctive characteristics of AR technology render the development of effective quality assessment metrics challenging. This paper presents a deep learning-based objective metric designed specifically for assessing image quality for AR scenarios. The approach entails four key steps, (1) fine-tuning a self-supervised pre-trained vision transformer to extract prominent features from reference images and distilling this knowledge to improve representations of distorted images, (2) quantifying distortions by computing shift representations, (3) employing cross-attention-based decoders to capture perceptual quality features, and (4) integrating regularization techniques and label smoothing to address the overfitting problem. To validate the proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments on the ARIQA dataset. The results showcase the superior performance of our proposed approach across all model variants, namely TransformAR, TransformAR-KD, and TransformAR-KD+ in comparison to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Automatic Image Quality Assessment (IQA) remains a difficult challenge due to the complexity of mimicking the Human Visual System (HVS) and the limitations of traditional objective Image Quality Metrics (IQM). Existing learnable methods often involve high computational costs and fail to adequately capture the nuanced perceptual characteristics of the HVS, including the human ability to rank image quality and human sensitivity to differences in areas with high-frequency. In this study, we propose an effective approach that addresses these challenges by incorporating the characteristics of HVS and the perceptual classification into a lightweight IQM framework based on the transformer architecture. This allows our method to capture long-range dependencies effectively. Our approach leverages Objective Error Maps (OEMs) to enhance sensitivity to visual errors and employs a ranking module as an objective function, providing feedback on the perceptual quality at the feature level. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach not only achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art IQMs but also significantly reduces computational complexity.

Ensuring the quality of Augmented Reality (AR) experiences is crucial for achieving user satisfaction in many applications such as navigation, education, and healthcare. However, automatic AR quality assessment is challenging due to limited data and the lack of a reference image notion in real-world scenarios. Hence, blind quality assessment appears to be the only plausible solution. Existing blind IQA metrics often struggle to capture perceptual features in AR content as effectively as they do in natural images. We propose ARaBIQA, the first blind image quality assessment (BIQA) method designed specifically for AR content. Using a self-supervised approach, ARaBIQA learns low-level AR-specific features, including distortions and visual confusion, and combines them with high-level content features through a joint fine-tuning strategy to produce robust quality predictions. The experimental results show that ARaBIQA outperforms existing blind IQA metrics, and ablation studies further validate its effectiveness.

With the rise of Augmented Reality (AR) technology, which enhances the real world by overlaying computer-generated content, immersive experiences are being offered in education, entertainment, healthcare, … Assessing the quality of AR scenarios is crucial for understanding and improving user satisfaction and engagement. However, developing objective AR quality assessment methods is challenging due to the lack of data and the inherent complexity of technology, particularly in the presence of visual confusion. Existing convolution neural network-based approaches suffer from limited receptive fields and are not effective at capturing global information in visually confused AR scenarios. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, exploring transformer capabilities for AR quality assessment is missing. Therefore, this study introduces transformAR, a lightweight transformer-based model for objective quality assessment in AR applications. This approach leverages pretrained vision transformer-based encoders to capture image content information, computes distance vectors to quantify distortions, and employs cross-attention-based decoders to model perceptual quality features. The model also integrates adapted regularization techniques and label smoothing to mitigate overfitting. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of transformAR, outperforming the few existing state-of-the-art methods.

Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is a widespread condition that can cause chronic pain and stiffness in the knee joint. Early detection and diagnosis are crucial for successful clinical intervention and management to prevent severe complications, such as loss of mobility. In this paper, we propose an automated approach that employs the Swin Transformer to predict the severity of KOA. Our model uses publicly available radiographic datasets with Kellgren and Lawrence scores to enable early detection and severity assessment. To improve the accuracy of our model, we employ a multi-prediction head architecture that utilizes multi-layer perceptron classifiers. Additionally, we introduce a novel training approach that reduces the data drift between multiple datasets to ensure the generalization ability of the model. The results of our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of our approach in predicting KOA severity accurately.

Predicting the quality of multimedia content is often needed in different fields. In some applications, quality metrics are crucial with a high impact, and can affect decision making such as diagnosis from medical multimedia. In this paper, we focus on such applications by proposing an efficient and shallow model for predicting the quality of medical images without reference from a small amount of annotated data. Our model is based on convolution self-attention that aims to model complex representation from relevant local characteristics of images, which itself slide over the image to interpolate the global quality score. We also apply domain adaptation learning in unsupervised and semi-supervised manner. The proposed model is evaluated through a dataset composed of several images and their corresponding subjective scores. The obtained results showed the efficiency of the proposed method, but also, the relevance of the applying domain adaptation to generalize over different multimedia domains regarding the downstream task of perceptual quality prediction.1