NTIRE 2026 The 3rd Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) Challenge: Professional Image Quality Assessment (Track 1)
AI 摘要
NTIRE 2026 RAIM挑战赛专注于利用MLLM进行专业图像质量评估。
主要贡献
- 提出了基于MLLM的专业图像质量评估新基准。
- 设计了比较质量选择和解释性推理两个任务。
- 发布了挑战赛数据集,促进了专业IQA领域的发展。
方法论
使用MLLM模仿人类专家认知,对高质量图像对进行比较并生成解释。
原文摘要
In this paper, we present an overview of the NTIRE 2026 challenge on the 3rd Restore Any Image Model in the Wild, specifically focusing on Track 1: Professional Image Quality Assessment. Conventional Image Quality Assessment (IQA) typically relies on scalar scores. By compressing complex visual characteristics into a single number, these methods fundamentally struggle to distinguish subtle differences among uniformly high-quality images. Furthermore, they fail to articulate why one image is superior, lacking the reasoning capabilities required to provide guidance for vision tasks. To bridge this gap, recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a promising paradigm. Inspired by this potential, our challenge establishes a novel benchmark exploring the ability of MLLMs to mimic human expert cognition in evaluating high-quality image pairs. Participants were tasked with overcoming critical bottlenecks in professional scenarios, centering on two primary objectives: (1) Comparative Quality Selection: reliably identifying the visually superior image within a high-quality pair; and (2) Interpretative Reasoning: generating grounded, expert-level explanations that detail the rationale behind the selection. In total, the challenge attracted nearly 200 registrations and over 2,500 submissions. The top-performing methods significantly advanced the state of the art in professional IQA. The challenge dataset is available at https://github.com/narthchin/RAIM-PIQA, and the official homepage is accessible at https://www.codabench.org/competitions/12789/.