Disentangling Aesthetic and Technical Effects for Video Quality Assessment of User Generated Content

User-generated-content (UGC) videos have dominated the Internet during recent years. While it is well-recognized that the perceptual quality of these videos can be affected by diverse factors, few existing methods explicitly explore the effects of different factors in video quality assessment (VQA) for UGC videos, i.e. the UGC-VQA problem. In this work, we make the first attempt to disentangle the effects of aesthetic quality issues and technical quality issues risen by the complicated video generation processes in the UGC-VQA problem. To overcome the absence of respective supervisions during disentanglement, we propose the Limited View Biased Supervisions (LVBS) scheme where two separate evaluators are trained with decomposed views specifically designed for each issue. Composed of an Aesthetic Quality Evaluator (AQE) and a Technical Quality Evaluator (TQE) under the LVBS scheme, the proposed Disentangled Objective Video Quality Evaluator (DOVER) reach excellent performance (0.91 SRCC for KoNViD-1k, 0.89 SRCC for LSVQ, 0.88 SRCC for YouTube-UGC) in the UGC-VQA problem. More importantly, our blind subjective studies prove that the separate evaluators in DOVER can effectively match human perception on respective disentangled quality issues. Codes and demos are released in https://github.com/teowu/dover.