No-Reference Physics-Based Quality Assessment of Polarization Images and Its Application to Demosaicking

Assessing the quality of polarization images is of significance for recovering reliable polarization information. Widely used quality assessment methods including peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index require reference data that is usually not available in practice. We introduce a simple and effective physics-based quality assessment method for polarization images that does not require any reference. This metric, based on the self-consistency of redundant linear polarization measurements, can thus be used to evaluate the quality of polarization images degraded by noise, misalignment, or demosaicking errors even in the absence of ground-truth. Based on this new metric, we propose a novel processing algorithm that significantly improves demosaicking of division-of-focal-plane polarization images by enabling efficient fusion between demosaicking algorithms and edge-preserving image filtering. Experimental results obtained on public databases and homemade polarization images show the effectiveness of the proposed method.