From Global to Granular: Revealing IQA Model Performance via Correlation Surface

Evaluation of Image Quality Assessment (IQA) models has long been dominated by global correlation metrics, such as Pearson Linear Correlation Coefficient (PLCC) and Spearman Rank-Order Correlation Coefficient (SRCC). While widely adopted, these metrics reduce performance to a single scalar, failing to capture how ranking consistency varies across the local quality spectrum. For example, two IQA models may achieve identical SRCC values, yet one ranks high-quality images (related to high Mean Opinion Score, MOS) more reliably, while the other better discriminates image pairs with small quality/MOS differences (related to $\mathrm{\mid }\mathrm{\Delta }$MOS$\mathrm{\mid }$). Such complementary behaviors are invisible under global metrics. Moreover, SRCC and PLCC are sensitive to test-sample quality distributions, yielding unstable comparisons across test sets. To address these limitations, we propose $\mathbf{\text{Granularity-Modulated}}\mathbf{\text{Correlation}}\mathbf{\text{(GMC)}}$, which provides a structured, fine-grained analysis of IQA performance. GMC includes: (1) a $\mathbf{\text{Granularity}}\mathbf{\text{Modulator}}$ that applies Gaussian-weighted correlations conditioned on absolute MOS values and pairwise MOS differences ($\mathrm{\mid }\mathrm{\Delta }$MOS$\mathrm{\mid }$) to examine local performance variations, and (2) a $\mathbf{\text{Distribution}}\mathbf{\text{Regulator}}$ that regularizes correlations to mitigate biases from non-uniform quality distributions. The resulting $\mathbf{\text{correlation}}\mathbf{\text{surface}}$ maps correlation values as a joint function of MOS and $\mathrm{\mid }\mathrm{\Delta }$MOS$\mathrm{\mid }$, providing a 3D representation of IQA performance. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that GMC reveals performance characteristics invisible to scalar metrics, offering a more informative and reliable paradigm for analyzing, comparing, and deploying IQA models. Codes are available at https://github.com/Dniaaa/GMC.