Camera Image Quality Metrics (Sharpness)

Introduction

Image system quality evaluation has been researched for a long time in industry and academia. The International Standards Organization (ISO) is developing a set of camera image quality metrics to quantify the spatial resolution, noise and color accuracy of digital cameras. Several metrics and methods are implemented to measure and calculate the spatial frequency response, which qualifies the sharpness of the image system. More specifically, the metric of MTF50 and acutance in ISO12233 standard are most appropriate to estimate the blurriness quality of the system. By varying some camera setting such as F/# of the lens and pixel size of the sensor, optimized image system could be achieved by plotting the MTF50 and acutance metrics. In this project, we also try to study the correlation between these objective metrics and human viewing experience estimated as the mean opinion score (MOS) which is computed by averaging all team members’ subjective image quality rating of the given image.

This paper is organized as follows. An overview of past work done in the image quality metrics area is given in the background section. The methods section talks about our methodology in metrics data generation and the design-compare flow. The results section encompasses our project results, including sample figures showing photos simulated under different conditions with varying viewing experiences. We will draw our conclusions in the conclusions section and show our references and source codes in the references and appendix sections, respectively.