Brain-Inspired Video Quality Assessment via Visual-EEG Feature Alignment

Video quality assessment (VQA) is crucial in applications such as video calls, real-time meetings, and surveillance, where video quality directly impacts user experience greatly. Traditional objective methods like SSIM and PSNR fail to capture the subjective perception of video quality, while subjective Quality of Experience (QoE) assessment metrics like Mean Opinion Score (MOS) are not scalable for large-scale automated VQA tasks. To overcome these limitations, deep learning approaches have emerged, but mostly focusing only on a single video modality, extracting low-level visual features such as color and texture. Recently, electroencephalography (EEG) has been shown to align with users’ subjective experiences, offering valuable insights into neural responses to visual content. Hence, in this letter, we propose a brain-inspired deep learning framework for VQA that aligns EEG and video features. We build a video distortion dataset annotated with both MOS and EEG signals to analyze the impact of video distortions on EEG responses and subjective ratings. We then employ an adaptive EEG feature learning network to extract EEG features linked to video distortions, and propose a video quality prediction network that aligns both video and EEG features using a three-stage training strategy. Our method outperforms existing techniques, showing strong alignment with human subjective ratings. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of EEG in enhancing VQA with a more human-centric approach.