Image quality fig. evaluator used in radiography based on contrast-detail phantom

In radiology, it is significantly important to produce adequate diagnostic information for affecting the patient with the lowest amount of dose. A contrast-detail phantom is generally used to study the quality of the image and the amount of radiation dose for a digital X-ray imaging system. For evaluating the quality of a phantom image, the radiologists are required to indicate the location of the holes in each square in the phantom image. Then, the image quality figure (IQF) of the image can be calculated. However, evaluation by the human eye is subjective and time-consuming. In this paper, an image processing based IQF evaluation method is proposed to automatically measure the quality of a phantom image. The experimental results tell that the proposed method is more sensitive in estimating the IQF of a phantom image than the observation of radiologists.