USTC-TD: A Test Dataset and Benchmark for Image and Video Coding in 2020s

Zhuoyuan Li; Junqi Liao; Chuanbo Tang; Haotian Zhang; Yuqi Li; Yifan Bian; Xihua Sheng; Xinmin Feng; Yao Li; Changsheng Gao; Li Li; Dong Liu; Feng Wu

arXiv · 2409.08481

USTC-TD: A Test Dataset and Benchmark for Image and Video Coding in 2020s

Zhuoyuan Li·Junqi Liao·Chuanbo Tang·Haotian Zhang·Yuqi Li·Yifan Bian·Xihua Sheng·Xinmin Feng·Yao Li·Changsheng Gao·Li Li·Dong Liu·Feng Wu

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Image/video coding has been a remarkable research area for both academia and industry for many years. Testing datasets, especially high-quality image/video datasets are desirable for the justified evaluation of coding-related research, practical applications, and standardization activities. We put forward a test dataset namely USTC-TD, which has been successfully adopted in the practical end-to-end image/video coding challenge of the IEEE International Conference on Visual Communications and Image Processing (VCIP) in 2022 and 2023. USTC-TD contains 40 images at 4K spatial resolution and 10 video sequences at 1080p spatial resolution, featuring various content due to the diverse environmental factors (e.g. scene type, texture, motion, view) and the designed imaging factors (e.g. illumination, lens, shadow). We quantitatively evaluate USTC-TD on different image/video features (spatial, temporal, color, lightness), and compare it with the previous image/video test datasets, which verifies its excellent compensation for the shortcomings of existing datasets. We also evaluate both classic standardized and recently learned image/video coding schemes on USTC-TD using objective quality metrics (PSNR, MS-SSIM, VMAF) and subjective quality metric (MOS), providing an extensive benchmark for these evaluated schemes. Based on the characteristics and specific design of the proposed test dataset, we analyze the benchmark performance and shed light on the future research and development of image/video coding. All the data are released online: https://esakak.github.io/USTC-TD.

Explore related subjects

eess.IV cs.CV

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Zhuoyuan Li, Junqi Liao, Chuanbo Tang, Haotian Zhang, Yuqi Li, Yifan Bian, Xihua Sheng, Xinmin Feng, Yao Li, Changsheng Gao, Li Li, Dong Liu, Feng Wu. 2025-03-16. USTC-TD: A Test Dataset and Benchmark for Image and Video Coding in 2020s. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08481

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

SCI-Mamba: Unsupervised Learning based Low-Light Image Enhancement for Non-Cooperative Spacecraft

Low-light visual perception acts as the core visual foundation for on-orbit servicing missions targeting non-cooperative spacecraft, supporting autonomous rendezvous, pose estimation, component detection and robotic capture operations. Spaceborne imagery suffers from severe low-light degradation, while the extreme scarcity of paired normal/low-light space samples severely limits the generalization capacity of supervised enhancement algorithms. To address this practical bottleneck, this paper proposes SCI-Mamba, an unsupervised enhancement network for low-light orbital spacecraft observations. The proposed framework unites self-calibrated unsupervised learning, linear-complexity VMamba architecture and Retinex physical priors, delivering a lightweight enhancement pipeline adaptable to resource-limited spaceborne hardware. We construct Space Dark-1.0, a dedicated low-light spacecraft dataset integrating real orbital footage, darkroom hardware-in-the-loop measurements and physically constrained synthetic data covering diverse illumination, motion and attitude conditions. Comprehensive comparisons with CNN-, Transformer- and prevailing Mamba-based approaches verify the advantages of SCI-Mamba in visual authenticity, color fidelity and inference speed. The proposed framework provides a practical low-light enhancement solution for close-proximity non-cooperative space operations. The code is available at https://github.com/bitswh/SCI-Mamba

eess.IV↗

arXiv2026

Recursive Uncertainty-Gated Image Registration for Learning-based Algorithms

Conventional image registration algorithms are robust to domain shifts and achieve low errors, but they are slow and computationally expensive. Deep-learning methods are efficient at inference-time, but face challenges in out-of-domain samples. We propose Recursive Uncertainty-Gated Image Registration (RUGI), an algorithm for iteratively refining deformation fields predicted by learning-based registration models. At each iteration, the registration model predicts an incremental deformation, and a gating map modulates the update. Refinements are hence concentrated in regions that remain difficult to register. We explore two gating strategies: a learned uncertainty-based approach and an image residual error approach. We evaluate RUGI on cardiac MRI and echocardiography datasets and show consistent improvements over single-step inference. Ablation experiments demonstrate that iterative refinement alone improves registration, but informative spatial gating provides a significant additional benefit. The error-gated variant of RUGI can also be applied directly to existing pretrained models; applied to VoxelMorph, TransMorph, and CycleMorph, it yields MSE reductions of 27-37% with no modification to the original training procedure. The improvements in registration performance are reflected in decreased errors in ejection fraction estimation relative to ground truths. These results demonstrate that spatially selective iterative refinement provides an effective strategy to improve registration accuracy at inference-time.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2026

STAMBRIDGE: Spectral-Temporal Amplitude-aware Mid-Feature Bridge for EEG Visual Decoding

Electroencephalography (EEG) visual decoding remains challenging due to the modality gap between low-SNR neural signals and highly structured vision--language spaces, making direct cross-modal alignment unstable. To address this, we propose STAMBRIDGE, a versatile two-stage framework that sequentially tackles feature conditioning and cross-modal alignment. First, we introduce a Spectral-Temporal Amplitude-aware Modulation (STAM) to extract well-conditioned EEG representations. By replacing hard frequency masking with amplitude-derived soft channel weighting and multi-scale temporal convolutions, STAM explicitly preserves frequency-aware transients while reducing the risk of time-domain ringing artifacts. Building upon these robust neural features, we further introduce a model-agnostic Mid-Feature Semantic Bridge (MFSB) that constructs a regularized intermediate space through directed cross-modal interactions, enabling staged distillation and more stable semantic alignment. Experiments on the THINGS-EEG benchmark show competitive 200-way zero-shot retrieval performance, with 34.50\% Top-1 and 65.95\% Top-5 accuracy. In addition, embeddings learned by STAMBRIDGE produce semantically coherent image reconstructions with a diffusion model, demonstrating robust EEG-to-vision semantic alignment. The code is available at: https://github.com/thabeatmjh/STAMBRIDGE.

eess.IV↗