A no-reference perceptual blur metric using histogram of gradient profile sharpness

No-reference measurement of blurring artifacts in images is a challenging problem in image quality assessment field. One of the difficulties is that the inherently blurry regions in some natural images may disturb the evaluation of blurring artifacts. In this paper, we study the image gradients along local image structures and propose a new perceptual blur metric to deal with the above problem. The gradient profile sharpness of image edge is efficiently calculated along horizontal or vertical direction. Then the sharpness distribution histogram rectified by just noticeable distortion (JND) threshold is used to evaluate the blurring artifacts and assess the image quality. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve good image quality prediction performance.