Saman Zadtootaghaj

Saman Zadtootaghaj

Senior Researcher · Sony Interactive Entertainment · Berlin

Saman Zadtootaghaj
Berlin, Germany
s.tootaghaj [at] gmail.com

Building perceptual and multimodal models that help machines see games the way players do.

I am a senior researcher at Sony Interactive Entertainment in Berlin. My work sits at the intersection of computer vision, multimodal learning, and human visual perception, with games as the application domain — quality assessment, anomaly detection, and scene understanding.

I joined Sony in 2021 as part of GPAI (Game Platform AI), working on Video Quality Assessment for gaming content. In 2022, GPAI was merged into the larger Visual Computing Group (VCG), where I continued on VQA and contributed to leading the team’s VQA efforts for a period. Since summer 2025, I have moved to the Anomaly Detection team, focusing on gaming visual anomalies and temporal tokenizers for gameplay video.

Before Sony, I was a senior research engineer at Dolby working on perceptual video encoding and human visual system modeling, and a research associate at TU Berlin on the EU H2020 ACCORDION project. I completed my Dr.-Ing. at TU Berlin under Prof. Sebastian Möller, on QoE modeling for cloud gaming, as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Deutsche Telekom’s T-Labs within the QoE-NET ITN.

Research interests: Visual quality assessment · Multimodal / vision-language models · Visual anomaly detection · Human visual perception · Gaming and cloud gaming QoE

Career

News

Sep 2025Joined the Anomaly Detection team at Sony PlayStation, working on visual anomaly detection in games and temporal tokenizers.
Sep 2025VideoGameQA-Bench accepted at NeurIPS 2025.
2025Papers accepted at WACV 2026 (Non-Aligned Reference IQA for Novel View Synthesis), ICIP 2025 (TriQA), and ICASSP 2025 (Foundation Models Boost Low-Level Perceptual Similarity Metrics).
2024Co-organized the Video Quality Assessment Challenge at AIS 2024 @ CVPR and the AIM 2024 UHD-IQA Challenge @ ECCV.
2024LAR-IQA presented at ECCV Workshops.
2022Published the book Quality of Experience Modeling for Cloud Gaming Services (Springer).
2021Defended my PhD at TU Berlin and joined Dolby as a senior research engineer.

Selected Publications

  1. NeurIPS
    VideoGameQA-Bench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Video Game Quality Assurance
    M. R. Taesiri, et al.
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Datasets and Benchmarks Track, 2025
  2. WACV
    Non-Aligned Reference Image Quality Assessment for Novel View Synthesis
    A. Ghildyal, R. Sureddi, et al.
    IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2026
  3. ICASSP
    Foundation Models Boost Low-Level Perceptual Similarity Metrics
    A. Ghildyal, N. Barman, S. Zadtootaghaj
    IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2025
  4. ICIP
    TriQA: Image Quality Assessment by Contrastive Pretraining on Ordered Distortion Triplets
    R. Sureddi, et al.
    IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2025
  5. ECCVW
    LAR-IQA: A Lightweight, Accurate, and Robust No-Reference IQA Model
    N. Jamshidi Avanaki, et al.
    European Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ECCVW), 2024
  6. CVPRW
    AIS 2024 Challenge on Video Quality Assessment of User-Generated Content: Methods and Results
    M. V. Conde, et al.
    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW), 2024
  7. Book
    Quality of Experience Modeling for Cloud Gaming Services
    S. Zadtootaghaj
    Springer, T-Labs Series in Telecommunication Services, 2022
    DOI
  8. MTAP
    NDNetGaming: Development of a No-Reference Deep CNN for Gaming Video Quality Prediction
    M. Utke, et al.
    Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2020
  9. MMSys
    Quality Estimation Models for Gaming Video Streaming Services Using Perceptual Video Quality Dimensions
    S. Zadtootaghaj, et al.
    ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys), 2020
  10. NetGames
    GamingVideoSET: A Dataset for Gaming Video Streaming Applications
    N. Barman, S. Zadtootaghaj, et al.
    Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames), 2018 · Best Paper Award

The full list is on Google Scholar.

Professional Service