Training Objective Image and Video Quality Estimators Using Multiple Databases

Machine learning (ML) is an essential part of recent advances in computer science. To fully exploit its potential, ML-based algorithms require a considerable amount of annotated data to be used for training. This represents a severe limitation in the field of image and video quality assessment since obtaining large-scale annotated databases is time-consuming and expensive. Moreover, the resulting quality estimators are mainly restricted only to the usecases included in the dataset used for their training. This paper proposes a strategy allowing for combination of multiple databases for training of objective image and video quality assessment algorithms. Using this strategy, the algorithms can be trained using all of the existing relevant databases together which allows to increase the amount of data-points and usecases in orders of magnitude. The potential of the proposed method is demonstrated by re-training the combination of features from Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) algorithm resulting in the significant improvement of its performance with respect to 20 video databases.