A no-reference metric for demosaicing artifacts that fits psycho visual experiments

The present work concerns the analysis of how demosaicing artifacts affect image quality and proposes a novel no-reference metric for their quantification. This metric that fits the psycho-visual data obtained by an experiment analyzes the perceived distortions produced by demosaicing algorithms. The demosaicing operation consists of a combination of color interpolation (CI) and anti-aliasing (AA) algorithms and converts a raw image acquired with a single sensor array, overlaid with a color filter array, into a full-color image. The most prominent artifact generated by demosaicing algorithms is called zipper. The zipper artifact is characterized by segments (zips) with an On-Off pattern. We perform psycho-visual experiments on a dataset of images that covers nine different degrees of distortions, obtained using three CI algorithms combined with two AA algorithms. We then propose our no-reference metric based on measures of blurriness, chromatic and achromatic distortions to fit the psycho-visual data. With this metric demosaicing algorithms could be evaluated and compared. © 2012 Gasparini et al..