Objective Image Quality Assessment for High Resolution Photospheric Images by Median Filter Gradient Similarity

All next generation ground-based and space-based solar telescopes require a good quality assessment metric in order to evaluate their imaging performance. In this paper, a new image quality metric, the median filter gradient similarity (MFGS) is proposed for photospheric images. MFGS is a no-reference/blind objective image quality metric (IQM) by a measurement result between 0 and 1 and has been performed on short-exposure photospheric images captured by the New Vacuum Solar Telescope (NVST) of the Fuxian Solar Observatory and by the Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) onboard the Hinode satellite, respectively. The results show that: (1)the measured value of MFGS changes monotonically from 1 to 0 with degradation of image quality; (2)there exists a linear correlation between the measured values of MFGS and root-mean-square-contrast (RMS-contrast) of granulation; (3)MFGS is less affected by the image contents than the granular RMS-contrast. Overall, MFGS is a good alternative for the quality assessment of photospheric images.