Papers › Curiously Effective Features for Image Quality Prediction
Curiously Effective Features for Image Quality Prediction
Sören Becker, Thomas Wiegand, Sebastian Bosse
The performance of visual quality prediction models is commonly assumed to be closely tied to their ability to capture perceptually relevant image aspects. Models are thus either based on sophisticated feature extractors carefully designed from extensive domain knowledge or optimized through feature learning. In contrast to this, we find feature extractors constructed from random noise to be sufficient to learn a linear regression model whose quality predictions reach high correlations with human visual quality ratings, on par with a model with learned features. We analyze this curious result and show that besides the quality of feature extractors also their quantity plays a crucial role - with top performances only being achieved in highly overparameterized models.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections