Computational Analysis of Degradation Modeling in Blind Panoramic Image Quality Assessment

Blind panoramic image quality assessment (BPIQA) has recently brought a new challenge to the visual quality community, due to the complex interaction between immersive content and human behavior. Although many efforts have been made to advance BPIQA from both conducting psychophysical experiments and designing performance-driven objective algorithms, limited content and few samples in those closed sets inevitably would result in shaky conclusions, thereby hindering the development of BPIQA; we refer to it as the easy-database issue. In this article, we present a sufficient computational analysis of degradation modeling in BPIQA to thoroughly explore the easy-database issue , where we carefully design three types of experiments via investigating the gap between BPIQA and blind image quality assessment (BIQA), the necessity of specific design in BPIQA models, and the generalization ability of BPIQA models. From extensive experiments, we find that easy databases narrow the gap between the performance of BPIQA and BIQA models, which is unconducive to the development of BPIQA. And the easy databases make the BPIQA models be closed to saturation; therefore, the effectiveness of the associated specific designs cannot be well verified. Besides, the BPIQA models trained on our recently proposed databases with complicated degradation show better generalization ability. Thus, we believe that much more efforts are highly desired to put into BPIQA from both subjective viewpoint and objective viewpoint.