Study of Subjective and Objective Naturalness Assessment of AI-Generated Images

Zijian Chen, Wei Sun, Haoning Wu, Zicheng Zhang, Jun Jia, Ru Huang, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai, Wenjun Zhang

Abstract: The proliferation of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Images (AIGIs) has greatly expanded the Image Naturalness Assessment (INA) problem. Different from early definitions that mainly focus on tone-mapped images with limited distortions (e.g., exposure, contrast, and color reproduction), INA on AI-generated images is especially challenging as it owns more diverse contents and could be affected by factors from multiple perspectives, including low-level technical distortions and high-level rationality distortions. In this paper, we take the first step to benchmark and assess the visual naturalness of AI-generated images. First, we construct the AI-Generated Image Naturalness (AGIN) dataset by conducting a large-scale subjective study to collect human opinions on the overall naturalness as well as perceptions from the technical quality and rationality perspectives. AGIN verifies several insights for the first time that naturalness is universally and disparately affected by both technical and rational distortions, while its manifestations vary with different generation tasks. Second, to automatically assess the naturalness of AIGIs that align with human opinions, we propose the Joint Objective Image Naturalness evaluaTor (JOINT). Specifically, JOINT imitates human reasoning in naturalness evaluation by jointly learning technical and rationality features with several specific designs to guide model behavior from respective perspectives. Experiments demonstrate that JOINT significantly outperforms existing methods for providing more subjectively consistent results on naturalness assessment. The dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/zijianchen98/AGIN.