Legit: Text Legibility For User-Generated Media

User-generated content (UGC) is ubiquitous across the internet as a result of billions of videos and images being uploaded each day. All kinds of UGC media are affected by natural distortions, occurring both during and after capture, which are inherently diverse and commingled. These distortions have different perceptual effects based on the media content. Given recent dramatic increases in the consumption of short-form content, the analysis and control of their perceptual quality has become an important problem. Regardless of the content, many UGC videos have overlaid and embedded texts in them, which are visually salient. Hence text quality has a significant impact on the global perception of video or image quality and needs to be studied. One of the most important factors in perceptual text quality in user-generated media is legibility, which has been studied very little in the context of computer vision. Predicting text legibility can also help in text recognition applications such as image search or document identification. This work aims at modeling text legibility using computer vision techniques and thus studying the relationship between text quality and legibility. We propose a modified dataset variant of COCO-Text [1] and a model for predicting text legibility for both handwritten and machine-generated texts. We also demonstrate how models trained to predict text legibility can help in the prediction of text (perceptual) quality. The dataset and models can be accessed here https://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/Quality/index.htm.