A study on the usability of opinion-unaware no-reference natural image quality metrics in the context of medical images

In this paper, we firstly study the possible usability of two state-of-the-art no-reference image quality assessment (IQA) metrics (NIQE and BIQES) originally designed for natural image, in the context of medical ones. We also proposed a modified NIQE, called NIQE-K, inspired by some BIQES features and more adapted to medical images. This study, based on evaluating concurrently the three methods, first encompasses tests conducted on natural IQA database (LIVE-Release2 and CSIQ). The second experiment is conducted on an ultrasound image with noise distortions. The last experiment includes tests on Magnetic Resonance images with compression distortions analyzed with quality scores evaluated by radiologists.

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