Position: Evaluation of Visual Processing Should Be Human-Centered, Not Metric-Centered

Abstract

This position paper argues that the evaluation of modern visual processing systems should no longer be driven primarily by single-metric image quality assessment benchmarks, particularly in the era of generative and perception-oriented methods. Image restoration exemplifies this divergence: while objective IQA metrics enable reproducible, scalable evaluation, they have increasingly drifted apart from human perception and user preferences. We contend that this mismatch risks constraining innovation and misguiding research progress across visual processing tasks. Rather than rejecting metrics altogether, this paper calls for a rebalancing of evaluation paradigms, advocating a more human-centered, context-aware, and fine-grained approach to assessing the visual models' outcomes.