Sharpness is an important determinant in visual assessment of image quality. The human visual system is able to effortlessly detect blur and evaluate sharpness of visual images, but the underlying mechanism is not fully understood. Existing blur/sharpness evaluation algorithms are mostly based on edge width, local gradient, or energy reduction of global/local high frequency content. Here we understand the subject from a different perspective, where sharpness is identified as strong local phase coherence (LPC) near distinctive image features evaluated in the complex wavelet transform domain. Previous LPC computation is restricted to be applied to complex coefficients spread in three consecutive dyadic scales in the scale-space. Here we propose a flexible framework that allows for LPC computation in arbitrary fractional scales. We then develop a new sharpness assessment algorithm without referencing the original image. We use four subject-rated publicly available image databases to test the proposed algorithm, which demonstrates competitive performance when compared with state-of-the-art algorithms.
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Sharpness is an important determinant in visual assessment of image quality. The human visual system is able to effortlessly detect blur and evaluate sharpness of visual images, but the underlying mechanism is not fully understood. Existing blur/sharpness evaluation algorithms are mostly based on edge width, local gradient, or energy reduction of global/local high frequency content. Here we understand the subject from a different perspective, where sharpness is identified as strong local phase coherence (LPC) near distinctive image features evaluated in the complex wavelet transform domain. Previous LPC computation is restricted to be applied to complex coefficients spread in three consecutive dyadic scales in the scale-space. Here we propose a flexible framework that allows for LPC computation in arbitrary fractional scales. We then develop a new sharpness assessment algorithm without referencing the original image. We use four subject-rated publicly available image databases to test the proposed algorithm, which demonstrates competitive performance when compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. 1 Index Terms-Complex wavelet transform, image blur, image quality assessment (IQA), image sharpness, local phase coherence (LPC), phase congruency. I. INTRODUCTIONQ UALITY assessment of visual images is of fundamental importance in modern multimedia systems, where various types of distortions are introduced during acquisition, storage, transmission, processing and display of images. Since humans are the ultimate consumers in most applications, the most dependable way to assess visual images is to solicit opinions from human observers. However, subjective evaluation is extremely costly and time-consuming, and is often difficult to implement in real applications, especially when real-time quality control is desired. What are really needed are efficient objective image quality assessment (IQA) approaches that can well predict human evaluations of image quality [1].The most common IQA approaches measure the similarity or fidelity between the distorted image and a reference image that is assumed to be perfect-quality and distortion-free.
There has been a growing interest in image fusion technologies, but how to objectively evaluate the quality of fused images has not been fully understood. Here, we propose a method for objective quality assessment of multiexposure multifocus image fusion based on the evaluation of three key factors of fused image quality: 1) contrast preservation; 2) sharpness; and 3) structure preservation. Subjective experiments are conducted to create an image fusion database, based on which, performance evaluation shows that the proposed fusion quality index correlates well with subjective scores, and gives a significant improvement over the existing fusion quality measures.
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