Image quality assessment: A review to full reference indexes

Abstract

An image quality index plays an increasingly vital role in image processing applications for dynamic monitoring and quality adjustment, optimization and parameter setting of the imaging systems, and finally benchmarking the image processing techniques. All the above goals highly require a sustainable quantitative measure of image quality. This manuscript analytically reviews the popular reference-based metrics of image quality which have been employed for the evaluation of image enhancement techniques. The efficiency and sustainability of eleven indexes are evaluated and compared in the assessment of image enhancement after the cancellation of speckle, salt and pepper, and Gaussian noises from MRI images separately by a linear filter and three varieties of morphological filters. The results indicate more clarity and sustainability of similarity-based indexes. The direction of designing a universal similarity-based index based on information content of the image is suggested as a future research direction.