1A Perceptual Image Sharpness Metric Based on Local Edge Gradient Analysis

Abstract—In this paper, a no-reference perceptual sharpness metric based on a statistical analysis of local edge gradients is presented. The method takes properties of the human visual sys-tem into account. Based on perceptual properties, a relationship between the extracted statistical features and the metric score is established to form a Perceptual Sharpness Index (PSI). A comparison with state-of-the-art metrics shows that the proposed method correlates highly with human perception and exhibits low computational complexity. In contrast to existing metrics, the PSI performs well for a wide range of blurriness and shows a high degree of invariance for different image contents. Index Terms—Image sharpness, image blur, no-reference, sharpness metric, perceptual, image quality assessment. I