Viewport-Independent Blind Quality Assessment of AI-Generated Omnidirectional Images via Vision-Language Correspondence

The advancement of deep generation technology has significantly enhanced the growth of artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC). Among these, AI-generated omnidirectional images (AGOIs), hold considerable promise for applications in virtual reality (VR). However, the quality of AGOIs varies widely, and there has been limited research focused on their quality assessment. In this letter, inspired by the characteristics of the human visual system, we propose a novel viewport-independent blindquality assessment method for AGOIs, termed VI-AGOIQA, which leverages vision-language correspondence. Specifically, to minimize the computational burden associated with viewport-based prediction methods for omnidirectional image quality assessment, a set of image patches are first extracted from AGOIs in Equirectangular Projection (ERP) format. Then, the correspondence between visual and textual inputs is effectively learned by utilizing the pre-trained image and text encoders of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model. Finally, a multimodal feature fusion module is applied to predict human visual preferences based on the learned knowledge of visual-language consistency. Extensive experiments conducted on publicly available database demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed method.