From Global to Granular: Revealing IQA Model Performance via Correlation Surface

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21738v1
• Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:55:26 GMT
• Title: From Global to Granular: Revealing IQA Model Performance via Correlation Surface
• Authors: Baoliang Chen, Danni Huang, Hanwei Zhu, Lingyu Zhu, Wei Zhou, Shiqi Wang, Yuming Fang, Weisi Lin,
• Abstract summary: We present textbfGranularity-Modulated Correlation (GMC), which provides a structured, fine-grained analysis of IQA performance.<n>GMC includes a textbfDistribution Regulator that regularizes correlations to mitigate biases from non-uniform quality distributions.<n>Experiments on standard benchmarks show that GMC reveals performance characteristics invisible to scalar metrics, offering a more informative and reliable paradigm for analyzing, comparing, and deploying IQA models.
• Score: 83.65597122328133
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Evaluation of Image Quality Assessment (IQA) models has long been dominated by global correlation metrics, such as Pearson Linear Correlation Coefficient (PLCC) and Spearman Rank-Order Correlation Coefficient (SRCC). While widely adopted, these metrics reduce performance to a single scalar, failing to capture how ranking consistency varies across the local quality spectrum. For example, two IQA models may achieve identical SRCC values, yet one ranks high-quality images (related to high Mean Opinion Score, MOS) more reliably, while the other better discriminates image pairs with small quality/MOS differences (related to $|Δ$MOS$|$). Such complementary behaviors are invisible under global metrics. Moreover, SRCC and PLCC are sensitive to test-sample quality distributions, yielding unstable comparisons across test sets. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{Granularity-Modulated Correlation (GMC)}, which provides a structured, fine-grained analysis of IQA performance. GMC includes: (1) a \textbf{Granularity Modulator} that applies Gaussian-weighted correlations conditioned on absolute MOS values and pairwise MOS differences ($|Δ$MOS$|$) to examine local performance variations, and (2) a \textbf{Distribution Regulator} that regularizes correlations to mitigate biases from non-uniform quality distributions. The resulting \textbf{correlation surface} maps correlation values as a joint function of MOS and $|Δ$MOS$|$, providing a 3D representation of IQA performance. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that GMC reveals performance characteristics invisible to scalar metrics, offering a more informative and reliable paradigm for analyzing, comparing, and deploying IQA models. Codes are available at https://github.com/Dniaaa/GMC.

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