The effect of opponent noise on image quality

A psychophysical experiment was performed examining the effect of luminance and chromatic noise on perceived image quality. The noise was generated in a recently developed isoluminant opponent space. 5 spatial frequency octave bands centered at 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32 cycles-per-degree (cpd) of visual angle were generated for each of the luminance, red-green, and blue-yellow channels. Two levels of contrast at each band were examined. Overall there were 30 images and 1 "original" image. Four different image scenes were used in a paired-comparison experiment. Observers were asked to select the image that appears to be of higher quality. The paired comparison data were used to generate interval scales of image quality using Thurstone's Law of Comparative Judgments. These interval scales provide insight into the effect of noise on perceived image quality. Averaged across the scenes, the original noise-free image was determined to be of highest quality. While this result is not surprising on its own, examining several of the individual scenes shows that adding low-contrast blue-yellow isoluminant noise does not statistically decrease image quality and can result in a slight increase in quality.