English

Predicting the Reliability of an Image Classifier under Image Distortion

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-07-23 v2

Abstract

In image classification tasks, deep learning models are vulnerable to image distortions i.e. their accuracy significantly drops if the input images are distorted. An image-classifier is considered "reliable" if its accuracy on distorted images is above a user-specified threshold. For a quality control purpose, it is important to predict if the image-classifier is unreliable/reliable under a distortion level. In other words, we want to predict whether a distortion level makes the image-classifier "non-reliable" or "reliable". Our solution is to construct a training set consisting of distortion levels along with their "non-reliable" or "reliable" labels, and train a machine learning predictive model (called distortion-classifier) to classify unseen distortion levels. However, learning an effective distortion-classifier is a challenging problem as the training set is highly imbalanced. To address this problem, we propose a Gaussian process based method to rebalance the training set. We conduct extensive experiments to show that our method significantly outperforms several baselines on six popular image datasets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.16881,
  title  = {Predicting the Reliability of an Image Classifier under Image Distortion},
  author = {Dang Nguyen and Sunil Gupta and Kien Do and Svetha Venkatesh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.16881},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:45:24.904Z