Image Quality Assessment (IQA)

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is a field in image processing that aims to objectively evaluate the quality of images. It involves developing algorithms and models that measure the perceived quality of images by simulating human perception. The purpose of IQA is to provide an automated and quantitative measure of image quality, which is valuable in various applications such as image compression, image enhancement, image acquisition, and image retrieval.

IQA algorithms typically analyze different aspects of images, including visual content, structural information, and artifacts. They consider factors like sharpness, contrast, color accuracy, noise, and distortions, among others. Researchers often use reference images to compare against degraded images and compute quality scores or predict how well humans would rate the image quality. These assessments can be based on mathematical models, statistics, machine learning techniques, or even human eye models. IQA plays a crucial role in optimizing image processing techniques, assessing the performance of imaging systems, and guiding the development of image enhancement algorithms by providing an objective measure of image quality.