Infrared image quality evaluation method without reference image

Since infrared image quality depends on many factors such as optical performance and electrical noise of thermal imager, image quality evaluation becomes an important issue which can conduce to both image processing afterward and capability improving of thermal imager. There are two ways of infrared image quality evaluation, with or without reference image. For real-time thermal image, the method without reference image is preferred because it is difficult to get a standard image. Although there are various kinds of methods for evaluation, there is no general metric for image quality evaluation. This paper introduces a novel method to evaluate infrared image without reference image from five aspects: noise, clarity, information volume and levels, information in frequency domain and the capability of automatic target recognition. Generally, the basic image quality is obtained from the first four aspects, and the quality of target is acquired from the last aspect. The proposed method is tested on several infrared images captured by different thermal imagers. Calculate the indicators and compare with human vision results. The evaluation shows that this method successfully describes the characteristics of infrared image and the result is consistent with human vision system.