MMHead: Towards Fine-grained Multi-modal 3D Facial Animation

3D facial animation has attracted considerable attention due to its extensive applications in the multimedia field. Audio-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored with promising results. However, multi-modal 3D facial animation, especially text-guided 3D facial animation is rarely explored due to the lack of multi-modal 3D facial animation dataset. To fill this gap, we first construct a large-scale multi-modal 3D facial animation dataset, MMHead, which consists of 49 hours of 3D facial motion sequences, speech audios, and rich hierarchical text annotations. Each text annotation contains abstract action and emotion descriptions, fine-grained facial and head movements (i.e., expression and head pose) descriptions, and three possible scenarios that may cause such emotion. Concretely, we integrate five public 2D portrait video datasets, and propose an automatic pipeline to 1) reconstruct 3D facial motion sequences from monocular videos; and 2) obtain hierarchical text annotations with the help of AU detection and ChatGPT. Based on the MMHead dataset, we establish benchmarks for two new tasks: text-induced 3D talking head animation and text-to-3D facial motion generation. Moreover, a simple but efficient VQ-VAE-based method named MM2Face is proposed to unify the multi-modal information and generate diverse and plausible 3D facial motions, which achieves competitive results on both benchmarks. Extensive experiments and comprehensive analysis demonstrate the significant potential of our dataset and benchmarks in promoting the development of multi-modal 3D facial animation.

How Does Audio Influence Visual Attention in Omnidirectional Videos? Database and Model

Understanding and predicting viewer attention in omnidirectional videos (ODVs) is crucial for enhancing user engagement in virtual and augmented reality applications. Although both audio and visual modalities are essential for saliency prediction in ODVs, the joint exploitation of these two modalities has been limited, primarily due to the absence of large-scale audio-visual saliency databases and comprehensive analyses. This paper comprehensively investigates audio-visual attention in ODVs from both subjective and objective perspectives. Specifically, we first introduce a new audio-visual saliency database for omnidirectional videos, termed AVS-ODV database, containing 162 ODVs and corresponding eye movement data collected from 60 subjects under three audio modes including mute, mono, and ambisonics. Based on the constructed AVS-ODV database, we perform an in-depth analysis of how audio influences visual attention in ODVs. To advance the research on audio-visual saliency prediction for ODVs, we further establish a new benchmark based on the AVS-ODV database by testing numerous state-of-the-art saliency models, including visual-only models and audio-visual models. In addition, given the limitations of current models, we propose an innovative omnidirectional audio-visual saliency prediction network (OmniAVS), which is built based on the U-Net architecture, and hierarchically fuses audio and visual features from the multimodal aligned embedding space. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed OmniAVS model outperforms other state-of-the-art models on both ODV AVS prediction and traditional AVS predcition tasks. The AVS-ODV database and OmniAVS model will be released to facilitate future research.

ESIQA: Perceptual Quality Assessment of Vision-Pro-based Egocentric Spatial Images

With the development of eXtended Reality (XR), head-mounted shooting and display technology have experienced significant advancement and gained considerable attention. Egocentric spatial images and videos are emerging as a compelling form of stereoscopic XR content. Different from traditional 2D images, egocentric spatial images present challenges for perceptual quality assessment due to their special shooting, processing methods, and stereoscopic characteristics. However, the corresponding image quality assessment (IQA) research for egocentric spatial images is still lacking. In this paper, we establish the Egocentric Spatial Images Quality Assessment Database (ESIQAD), the first IQA database dedicated for egocentric spatial images as far as we know. Our ESIQAD includes 500 egocentric spatial images, containing 400 images captured with the Apple Vision Pro and 100 images generated via an iPhone's "Spatial Camera" app. The corresponding mean opinion scores (MOSs) are collected under three viewing modes, including 2D display, 3D-window display, and 3D-immersive display. Furthermore, based on our database, we conduct a benchmark experiment and evaluate the performance of 22 state-of-the-art IQA models under three different viewing modes. We hope this research can facilitate future IQA research on egocentric spatial images. The database is available at https://github.com/IntMeGroup/ESIQA.

UniProcessor: A Text-induced Unified Low-level Image Processor

Image processing, including image restoration, image enhancement, etc., involves generating a high-quality clean image from a degraded input. Deep learning-based methods have shown superior performance for various image processing tasks in terms of single-task conditions. However, they require to train separate models for different degradations and levels, which limits the generalization abilities of these models and restricts their applications in real-world. In this paper, we propose a text-induced unified image processor for low-level vision tasks, termed UniProcessor, which can effectively process various degradation types and levels, and support multimodal control. Specifically, our UniProcessor encodes degradation-specific information with the subject prompt and process degradations with the manipulation prompt. These context control features are injected into the UniProcessor backbone via cross-attention to control the processing procedure. For automatic subject-prompt generation, we further build a vision-language model for general-purpose low-level degradation perception via instruction tuning techniques. Our UniProcessor covers 30 degradation types, and extensive experiments demonstrate that our UniProcessor can well process these degradations without additional training or tuning and outperforms other competing methods. Moreover, with the help of degradation-aware context control, our UniProcessor first shows the ability to individually handle a single distortion in an image with multiple degradations.

Quality-guided Skin Tone Enhancement for Portrait Photography

In recent years, learning-based color and tone enhancement methods for photos have become increasingly popular. However, most learning-based image enhancement methods just learn a mapping from one distribution to another based on one dataset, lacking the ability to adjust images continuously and controllably. It is important to enable the learning-based enhancement models to adjust an image continuously, since in many cases we may want to get a slighter or stronger enhancement effect rather than one fixed adjusted result. In this paper, we propose a quality-guided image enhancement paradigm that enables image enhancement models to learn the distribution of images with various quality ratings. By learning this distribution, image enhancement models can associate image features with their corresponding perceptual qualities, which can be used to adjust images continuously according to different quality scores. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, a subjective quality assessment experiment is first conducted, focusing on skin tone adjustment in portrait photography. Guided by the subjective quality ratings obtained from this experiment, our method can adjust the skin tone corresponding to different quality requirements. Furthermore, an experiment conducted on 10 natural raw images corroborates the effectiveness of our model in situations with fewer subjects and fewer shots, and also demonstrates its general applicability to natural images. Our project page is https://github.com/IntMeGroup/quality-guided-enhancement .

MVBIND: Self-Supervised Music Recommendation For Videos Via Embedding Space Binding

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of short videos, which usually contain both visual and audio modalities. Background music is important to the short videos, which can significantly influence the emotions of the viewers. However, at present, the background music of short videos is generally chosen by the video producer, and there is a lack of automatic music recommendation methods for short videos. This paper introduces MVBind, an innovative Music-Video embedding space Binding model for cross-modal retrieval. MVBind operates as a self-supervised approach, acquiring inherent knowledge of intermodal relationships directly from data, without the need of manual annotations. Additionally, to compensate the lack of a corresponding musical-visual pair dataset for short videos, we construct a dataset, SVM-10K(Short Video with Music-10K), which mainly consists of meticulously selected short videos. On this dataset, MVBind manifests significantly improved performance compared to other baseline methods. The constructed dataset and code will be released to facilitate future research.

Understanding and Evaluating Human Preferences for AI Generated Images with Instruction Tuning

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has grown rapidly in recent years, among which AI-based image generation has gained widespread attention due to its efficient and imaginative image creation ability. However, AI-generated Images (AIGIs) may not satisfy human preferences due to their unique distortions, which highlights the necessity to understand and evaluate human preferences for AIGIs. To this end, in this paper, we first establish a novel Image Quality Assessment (IQA) database for AIGIs, termed AIGCIQA2023+, which provides human visual preference scores and detailed preference explanations from three perspectives including quality, authenticity, and correspondence. Then, based on the constructed AIGCIQA2023+ database, this paper presents a MINT-IQA model to evaluate and explain human preferences for AIGIs from Multi-perspectives with INstruction Tuning. Specifically, the MINT-IQA model first learn and evaluate human preferences for AI-generated Images from multi-perspectives, then via the vision-language instruction tuning strategy, MINT-IQA attains powerful understanding and explanation ability for human visual preference on AIGIs, which can be used for feedback to further improve the assessment capabilities. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MINT-IQA model achieves state-of-the-art performance in understanding and evaluating human visual preferences for AIGIs, and the proposed model also achieves competing results on traditional IQA tasks compared with state-of-the-art IQA models. The AIGCIQA2023+ database and MINT-IQA model will be released to facilitate future research.

How is Visual Attention Influenced by Text Guidance? Database and Model

The analysis and prediction of visual attention have long been crucial tasks in the fields of computer vision and image processing. In practical applications, images are generally accompanied by various text descriptions, however, few studies have explored the influence of text descriptions on visual attention, let alone developed visual saliency prediction models considering text guidance. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on text-guided image saliency (TIS) from both subjective and objective perspectives. Specifically, we construct a TIS database named SJTU-TIS, which includes 1200 text-image pairs and the corresponding collected eye-tracking data. Based on the established SJTU-TIS database, we analyze the influence of various text descriptions on visual attention. Then, to facilitate the development of saliency prediction models considering text influence, we construct a benchmark for the established SJTU-TIS database using state-of-the-art saliency models. Finally, considering the effect of text descriptions on visual attention, while most existing saliency models ignore this impact, we further propose a text-guided saliency (TGSal) prediction model, which extracts and integrates both image features and text features to predict the image saliency under various text-description conditions. Our proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art saliency models on both the SJTU-TIS database and the pure image saliency databases in terms of various evaluation metrics. The SJTU-TIS database and the code of the proposed TGSal model will be released at: https://github.com/IntMeGroup/TGSal.

AIGCOIQA2024: Perceptual Quality Assessment of AI Generated Omnidirectional Images

In recent years, the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has attracted widespread attention. Among the AIGC, AI generated omnidirectional images hold significant potential for Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications, hence omnidirectional AIGC techniques have also been widely studied. AI-generated omnidirectional images exhibit unique distortions compared to natural omnidirectional images, however, there is no dedicated Image Quality Assessment (IQA) criteria for assessing them. This study addresses this gap by establishing a large-scale AI generated omnidirectional image IQA database named AIGCOIQA2024 and constructing a comprehensive benchmark. We first generate 300 omnidirectional images based on 5 AIGC models utilizing 25 text prompts. A subjective IQA experiment is conducted subsequently to assess human visual preferences from three perspectives including quality, comfortability, and correspondence. Finally, we conduct a benchmark experiment to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art IQA models on our database. The database will be released to facilitate future research.

Perceptual Video Quality Assessment: A Survey

Perceptual video quality assessment plays a vital role in the field of video processing due to the existence of quality degradations introduced in various stages of video signal acquisition, compression, transmission and display. With the advancement of internet communication and cloud service technology, video content and traffic are growing exponentially, which further emphasizes the requirement for accurate and rapid assessment of video quality. Therefore, numerous subjective and objective video quality assessment studies have been conducted over the past two decades for both generic videos and specific videos such as streaming, user-generated content (UGC), 3D, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), high frame rate (HFR), audio-visual, etc. This survey provides an up-to-date and comprehensive review of these video quality assessment studies. Specifically, we first review the subjective video quality assessment methodologies and databases, which are necessary for validating the performance of video quality metrics. Second, the objective video quality assessment algorithms for general purposes are surveyed and concluded according to the methodologies utilized in the quality measures. Third, we overview the objective video quality assessment measures for specific applications and emerging topics. Finally, the performances of the state-of-the-art video quality assessment measures are compared and analyzed. This survey provides a systematic overview of both classical works and recent progresses in the realm of video quality assessment, which can help other researchers quickly access the field and conduct relevant research.