Objective assessment of perceived sharpness of projection displays with a calibrated camera

Sharpness is an important image quality attribute for projection displays. However, it has not been well studied for projection displays in the existing literature. In this paper, we conduct an experimental study of perceived sharpness on projection displays in a controlled environment. The basic idea is to simulate the optical blurring process with Gaussian filtering and apply them to selected natural images. We project these distorted images onto the screen, and we invite a group of human observers to give perceptual ratings. We also use a calibrated camera to capture them in order to measure the sharpness with eight state-of-art image quality metrics. The correlations between the objective and subjective results indicate that SSIM, FSIM and VIF metrics give excellent average performance.