A sensor-based approach to image quality

In the past 20 years a large effort has been made to characterize the image quality of remote sensing systems. The image quality can actually be measured only by the quality of the final product (e.g. object detection, classification). One option now is to use the National Image Interpretability Rating Scales (NIIRS), because NIIRS is related to object detection. From an engineering standpoint a task-based scale, like NIIRS is not well suited, because it cannot be derived from the fundamental sensor and scene behaviour. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to derive an image quality criterion, based on the physical characteristics of sensor and scene. To assess the image quality, we compare the output of the real sensor with the output of an ideal sensor based on a Local Mean Squared Error (LMSE). This criterion, we abbreviate in the following with YAIQC (Yet Another Image Quality Criteria