  Quality assessment of omnidirectional images has become increasingly urgent
due to the rapid growth of virtual reality applications. Different from
traditional 2D images and videos, omnidirectional contents can provide
consumers with freely changeable viewports and a larger field of view covering
the $360^{\circ}\times180^{\circ}$ spherical surface, which makes the objective
quality assessment of omnidirectional images more challenging. In this paper,
motivated by the characteristics of the human vision system (HVS) and the
viewing process of omnidirectional contents, we propose a novel Viewport
oriented Graph Convolution Network (VGCN) for blind omnidirectional image
quality assessment (IQA). Generally, observers tend to give the subjective
rating of a 360-degree image after passing and aggregating different viewports
information when browsing the spherical scenery. Therefore, in order to model
the mutual dependency of viewports in the omnidirectional image, we build a
spatial viewport graph. Specifically, the graph nodes are first defined with
selected viewports with higher probabilities to be seen, which is inspired by
the HVS that human beings are more sensitive to structural information. Then,
these nodes are connected by spatial relations to capture interactions among
them. Finally, reasoning on the proposed graph is performed via graph
convolutional networks. Moreover, we simultaneously obtain global quality using
the entire omnidirectional image without viewport sampling to boost the
performance according to the viewing experience. Experimental results
demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art full-reference
and no-reference IQA metrics on two public omnidirectional IQA databases.
