Paper accepted @ QoMEX 2026

Title: QoMEX 2026 Grand Challenge on Video Quality Assessment for Asymmetric Encoded Videos: Methods and Results

Authors: Jingwen Zhu, Hadi Amirpour, Christian Timmerer, et al.

Abstract: This paper presents the results of the Grand Challenge on Video Quality Assessment for Asymmetric Encoded Videos, held at QoMEX 2026 in Cardiff, UK. The challenge addresses the growing need for video quality metrics (VQM) capable of accurately predicting the perceptual quality of asymmetrically encoded videos, where saliency-driven or semantic-based encoding allocates different quality levels to different spatial regions. Participants were provided with the Sport-ROI dataset containing subjective quality scores and were invited to develop both full-reference (FR) and no-reference (NR) VQM models. We describe the challenge design, the dataset, the evaluation methodology, and summarize the submitted approaches and their performance.