Wouldn't it be nice if we could have a machine that would be able to assess the quality of an image or imaging device in a similar way to humans? A number of current methods exist to do such a task. Unfortunately, they often do not produce the same quality assessment that a human would make. The goal of my research project is to design a system that produces image quality assessments that more closely match the assessments that people would make. We do this by trying to convince a computer to produce reliable estimates of image quality that correspond well with what a person would see. The approach that we are taking is to try to describe mathematically how people perceive things. We can then use a computer to mathematically evaluate the quality of a given image. The mathematically description that we are developing is based on the biology of the human eye and perceptual experiments that we have done in our lab. I have written the same story over again, but have added many more details.
I also have some preliminary results.
More technical details are also available.