papers

Publications (30)

cs.CV2026

Subjective Portrait Region Cropping in Landscape Videos with Temporal Annotation Smoothing

Cheng-Han Lee, Maniratnam Mandal, Neil Birkbeck +3

With the rise of mobile video consumption on diverse handheld display resolutions and orientation modes, altering videos to aspect ratios poses challenges. Static cropping and bord…

cs.MM2021

ST-GREED: Space-Time Generalized Entropic Differences for Frame Rate Dependent Video Quality Prediction

Pavan C. Madhusudana, Neil Birkbeck, Yilin Wang +2

We consider the problem of conducting frame rate dependent video quality assessment (VQA) on videos of diverse frame rates, including high frame rate (HFR) videos. More generally,…

cs.CV2021

UGC-VQA: Benchmarking Blind Video Quality Assessment for User Generated Content

Zhengzhong Tu, Yilin Wang, Neil Birkbeck +2

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of user-generated content (UGC) videos shared and streamed over the Internet, thanks to the evolution of affordable and reliable consumer c…

eess.IV2025

Avoiding Quality Saturation in UGC Compression Using Denoised References

Xin Xiong, Samuel Fernández-Menduiña, Eduardo Pavez +3

Video-sharing platforms must re-encode large volumes of noisy user-generated content (UGC) to meet streaming demands. However, conventional codecs, which aim to minimize the mean s…

eess.IV2022

Making Video Quality Assessment Models Sensitive to Frame Rate Distortions

Pavan C. Madhusudana, Neil Birkbeck, Yilin Wang +2

We consider the problem of capturing distortions arising from changes in frame rate as part of Video Quality Assessment (VQA). Variable frame rate (VFR) videos have become much mor…

eess.IV2020

Predicting the Quality of Compressed Videos with Pre-Existing Distortions

Xiangxu Yu, Neil Birkbeck, Yilin Wang +3

Over the past decade, the online video industry has greatly expanded the volume of visual data that is streamed and shared over the Internet. Moreover, because of the increasing ea…

cs.MM2021

Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of High Frame Rate Videos

Pavan C. Madhusudana, Xiangxu Yu, Neil Birkbeck +3

High frame rate (HFR) videos are becoming increasingly common with the tremendous popularity of live, high-action streaming content such as sports. Although HFR contents are genera…

cs.LG2026

TABES: Trajectory-Aware Backward-on-Entropy Steering for Masked Diffusion Models

Shreshth Saini, Avinab Saha, Balu Adsumilli +3

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising non-autoregressive paradigm for generative tasks, offering parallel decoding and bidirectional context utilization. Howev…

cs.CV2024

An Ensemble Approach to Short-form Video Quality Assessment Using Multimodal LLM

Wen Wen, Yilin Wang, Neil Birkbeck +1

The rise of short-form videos, characterized by diverse content, editing styles, and artifacts, poses substantial challenges for learning-based blind video quality assessment (BVQA…

cs.MM2020

A Comparative Evaluation of Temporal Pooling Methods for Blind Video Quality Assessment

Zhengzhong Tu, Chia-Ju Chen, Li-Heng Chen +3

Many objective video quality assessment (VQA) algorithms include a key step of temporal pooling of frame-level quality scores. However, less attention has been paid to studying the…

eess.IV2022

CONVIQT: Contrastive Video Quality Estimator

Pavan C. Madhusudana, Neil Birkbeck, Yilin Wang +2

Perceptual video quality assessment (VQA) is an integral component of many streaming and video sharing platforms. Here we consider the problem of learning perceptually relevant vid…

cs.CV2021

Regression or Classification? New Methods to Evaluate No-Reference Picture and Video Quality Models

Zhengzhong Tu, Chia-Ju Chen, Li-Heng Chen +4

Video and image quality assessment has long been projected as a regression problem, which requires predicting a continuous quality score given an input stimulus. However, recent ef…

cs.MM2019

Visual Distortions in 360-degree Videos

Roberto G. de A. Azevedo, Neil Birkbeck, Francesca De Simone +3

Omnidirectional (or 360-degree) images and videos are emergent signals in many areas such as robotics and virtual/augmented reality. In particular, for virtual reality, they allow…

cs.AI2026

CachedSearch: Training-Free Cached Exploration for Test-Time Search in Video Diffusion

Shreshth Saini, Neil Birkbeck, Yilin Wang +2

Test-time search lets small video diffusion models rival larger ones, but costs 2-10x more. All candidates are fully denoised, although most are discarded. Training-free caching ma…

eess.IV2022

Perceptual Quality Assessment of UGC Gaming Videos

Xiangxu Yu, Zhengzhong Tu, Neil Birkbeck +3

In recent years, with the vigorous development of the video game industry, the proportion of gaming videos on major video websites like YouTube has dramatically increased. However,…

cs.CV2026

Seeing Beyond 8bits: Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of HDR-UGC Videos

Shreshth Saini, Bowen Chen, Neil Birkbeck +3

High Dynamic Range (HDR) user-generated (UGC) videos are rapidly proliferating across social platforms, yet most perceptual video quality assessment (VQA) systems remain tailored t…

eess.IV2026

Rate-Distortion Optimization for Ensembles of Non-Reference Metrics

Xin Xiong, Samuel Fernández-Menduiña, Eduardo Pavez +3

Non-reference metrics (NRMs) can assess the visual quality of images and videos without a reference, making them well-suited for the evaluation of user-generated content. Nonethele…

cs.CV2022

Subjective and Objective Analysis of Streamed Gaming Videos

Xiangxu Yu, Zhenqiang Ying, Neil Birkbeck +3

The rising popularity of online User-Generated-Content (UGC) in the form of streamed and shared videos, has hastened the development of perceptual Video Quality Assessment (VQA) mo…

cs.MM2020

Capturing Video Frame Rate Variations via Entropic Differencing

Pavan C. Madhusudana, Neil Birkbeck, Yilin Wang +2

High frame rate videos are increasingly getting popular in recent years, driven by the strong requirements of the entertainment and streaming industries to provide high quality of…

cs.MM2020

Subjective Quality Assessment for YouTube UGC Dataset

Joong Gon Yim, Yilin Wang, Neil Birkbeck +1

Due to the scale of social video sharing, User Generated Content (UGC) is getting more attention from academia and industry. To facilitate compression-related research on UGC, YouT…

cs.CV2021

RAPIQUE: Rapid and Accurate Video Quality Prediction of User Generated Content

Zhengzhong Tu, Xiangxu Yu, Yilin Wang +3

Blind or no-reference video quality assessment of user-generated content (UGC) has become a trending, challenging, heretofore unsolved problem. Accurate and efficient video quality…

eess.IV2022

Direct Optimisation of for HDR Content Adaptive Transcoding in AV1

Vibhoothi, François Pitié, Angeliki Katsenou +6

Since the adoption of VP9 by Netflix in 2016, royalty-free coding standards continued to gain prominence through the activities of the AOMedia consortium. AV1, the latest open sour…

cs.MM2021

Multi-feature 360 Video Quality Estimation

Roberto G. de A. Azevedo, Neil Birkbeck, Ivan Janatra +2

We propose a new method for the visual quality assessment of 360-degree (omnidirectional) videos. The proposed method is based on computing multiple spatio-temporal objective quali…

cs.CV2021

Image Quality Assessment using Contrastive Learning

Pavan C. Madhusudana, Neil Birkbeck, Yilin Wang +2

We consider the problem of obtaining image quality representations in a self-supervised manner. We use prediction of distortion type and degree as an auxiliary task to learn featur…

cs.CV2026

LumaFlux: Lifting 8-Bit Worlds to HDR Reality with Physically-Guided Diffusion Transformers

Shreshth Saini, Hakan Gedik, Neil Birkbeck +3

The rapid adoption of HDR-capable devices has created a pressing need to convert the 8-bit Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) content into perceptually and physically accurate 10-bit Hig…

cs.CV2024

YouTube SFV+HDR Quality Dataset

Yilin Wang, Joong Gon Yim, Neil Birkbeck +1

The popularity of Short form videos (SFV) has grown dramatically in the past few years, and has become a phenomenal video category with billions of viewers. Meanwhile, High Dynamic…

cs.MM2021

High Frame Rate Video Quality Assessment using VMAF and Entropic Differences

Pavan C Madhusudana, Neil Birkbeck, Yilin Wang +2

The popularity of streaming videos with live, high-action content has led to an increased interest in High Frame Rate (HFR) videos. In this work we address the problem of frame rat…

eess.IV2025

Rate-Distortion Optimization with Non-Reference Metrics for UGC Compression

Samuel Fernández-Menduiña, Xin Xiong, Eduardo Pavez +3

Service providers must encode a large volume of noisy videos to meet the demand for user-generated content (UGC) in online video-sharing platforms. However, low-quality UGC challen…

cs.CV2025

CHUG: Crowdsourced User-Generated HDR Video Quality Dataset

Shreshth Saini, Alan C. Bovik, Neil Birkbeck +2

High Dynamic Range (HDR) videos enhance visual experiences with superior brightness, contrast, and color depth. The surge of User-Generated Content (UGC) on platforms like YouTube…

cs.CV2026

Context and Pixel Aware Large Language Model for Video Quality Assessment

Wen Wen, Yaohong Wu, Yue Sheng +3

Video quality assessment (VQA) is a challenging research topic with broad applications. Traditional hand-crafted and discriminative learning-based VQA models mainly focus on pixel-…