Video Coding for Machines (VCM) aims to compress visual signals for machine
analysis. However, existing methods only consider a few machines, neglecting
the majority. Moreover, the machine perceptual characteristics are not
effectively leveraged, leading to suboptimal compression efficiency. In this
paper, we introduce Satisfied Machine Ratio (SMR) to address these issues. SMR
statistically measures the quality of compressed images and videos for machines
by aggregating satisfaction scores from them. Each score is calculated based on
the difference in machine perceptions between original and compressed images.
Targeting image classification and object detection tasks, we build two
representative machine libraries for SMR annotation and construct a large-scale
SMR dataset to facilitate SMR studies. We then propose an SMR prediction model
based on the correlation between deep features differences and SMR.
Furthermore, we introduce an auxiliary task to increase the prediction accuracy
by predicting the SMR difference between two images in different quality
levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that using the SMR models
significantly improves compression performance for VCM, and the SMR models
generalize well to unseen machines, traditional and neural codecs, and
datasets. In summary, SMR enables perceptual coding for machines and advances
VCM from specificity to generality. Code is available at
\url{https://github.com/ywwynm/SMR}