Blind quality assessment for slice of microtomographic image

Abstract

The paper considers a new algorithm for blind quality assessment of a slice of X-ray microtomographic image. We selected the following factors impacting on micro-CT image quality with respect to Digital Rock technology: Smoothness, sharpness, contrast, absence of high-density regions and ring artifacts. We propose algorithms for estimation of partial quality measures for named factors inside Region-of-Interest, that is in area associated with a sample of rock or granular material. Total quality metrics is calculated as a product of these partial measures. Our method for quality assessment provides reasonable outcomes for synthetic and real slices of micro-CT images. We collected experts' judgments about quality of slices. Proposed solution has a high correlation with scores of experts and outperforms existing blind quality metrics. An application of developed method to all slices allows to obtain quality estimation for 3D micro-CT image.