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Yibu Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Yibu Yang.

2 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

BiCG-Net: Target-Specific Image Quality Assessment via Observation Modeling and In-Image Differencing

We estimate the quality of a specific target region (e.g., a train body) in an image, rather than the whole image. This differs fundamentally from whole-image No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA): when the target occupies a small fraction of the frame, the whole-image score is dominated by background, and no public benchmark provides target-level human Mean Opinion Score (MOS). We estimate target quality via nested sampling - a sequence of patches expanding outward from the target box - and infer quality from the relative structure of this sequence. This motivates BiCG-Net, a student network that distills an 11-teacher ensemble through a linear observation model and an in-image differencing mechanism, which provably cancels the target term and teacher-specific bias. We train and test the student independently on each dataset, and evaluate zero-shot transfer across benchmarks. On CSIQ and LIVEC, the student reaches PLCCs of 0.9009 and 0.9133 against human MOS, exceeding the best single teacher and the teacher consensus. On a self-built MOS-free railway dataset, the student reaches a PLCC of 0.9855 against a weak label. The student exceeds its teachers because it learns a new mapping from the relative structure of teacher readings to the ground-truth label, rather than mimicking them. Residual analysis on CSIQ and LIVEC shows the prediction residual is significantly correlated with background contamination, teacher dispersion, and label extremity, demonstrating the student extracts information the consensus does not contain. Under CSIQ-to-LIVEC transfer, the frozen student reaches a PLCC of 0.8416, exceeding the consensus by 0.1947. We position BiCG-Net as an offline target-level quality auditing and label-generation engine; its 39,482-parameter student is compact by design, acting as a unifying layer mapping heterogeneous teacher readings onto a common quality scale.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Self-Supervised Topologically Invariant Manifold Learning for Railway Image Quality Assessment

Existing blind image quality assessment (BIQA) methods typically rely on synthetic distortions and subjective annotations, limiting generalization in real-world domains. To address this, we propose a fully self-supervised BIQA framework based on topologically invariant manifold learning under boundary constraints, which constructs a stable quality reference without manual labels. The framework generates progressive background dilution scales via repeated random cropping around each target; exploiting the monotonic degradation of target information density across these scales, it establishes a self-constrained quality manifold. A linearized spatial moment projection eliminates geometric distortions from random cropping; then a monotonicity divergence filter prunes background-sensitive evaluators, isolating an elite pool \(\mathcal{M}_{\text{elite}}\). A robust M-estimator with a principal component stabilizer fuses the metrics into an asymptotically efficient pseudo-ground truth \(q_{\text{PGT}}\), contracting variance toward the Cramér-Rao lower bound. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that the elite evaluator pool, distilled from 11 baseline metrics, secures superior zero-shot transferability across standard synthetic and wild benchmarks (CSIQ, LIVEC, LIVE-2). Concurrently, deployments on the CQU Railway Rolling Stock Surveillance Dataset (2,797 images) yield a manifold cosine similarity \(>0.999\) and a 100.0\% survival rate under industrial extreme stresses, robustly validating its cross-paradigm decoupling and topological resilience.

cs.CV↗