Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of Colonoscopy Videos

Captured colonoscopy videos usually suffer from multiple real-world distortions, such as motion blur, low brightness, abnormal exposure, and object occlusion, which impede visual interpretation. However, existing works mainly investigate the impacts of synthesized distortions, which differ from real-world distortions greatly. This research aims to carry out an in-depth study for colonoscopy Video Quality Assessment (VQA). In this study, we advance this topic by establishing both subjective and objective solutions. Firstly, we collect 1,000 colonoscopy videos with typical visual quality degradation conditions in practice and construct a multi-attribute VQA database. The quality of each video is annotated by subjective experiments from five distortion attributes (i.e., temporal-spatial visibility, brightness, specular reflection, stability, and utility), as well as an overall perspective. Secondly, we propose a Distortion Attribute Reasoning Network (DARNet) for automatic VQA. DARNet includes two streams to extract features related to spatial and temporal distortions, respectively. It adaptively aggregates the attribute-related features through a multi-attribute association module to predict the quality score of each distortion attribute. Motivated by the observation that the rating behaviors for all attributes are different, a behavior guided reasoning module is further used to fuse the attribute-aware features, resulting in the overall quality. Experimental results on the constructed database show that our DARNet correlates well with subjective ratings and is superior to nine state-of-the-art methods.