Most of the effort in image quality assessment (QA) has been so far dedicated to the degradation of the image. However, there are also many algorithms in the image processing chain that can enhance the quality of an input image. These include procedures for contrast enhancement, deblurring, sharpening, up-sampling, denoising, transfer function compensation, etc. In this work, possible strategies for the quality assessment of sharpened images are investigated. This task is not trivial because the sharpening techniques can increase the perceived quality, as well as introduce artifacts leading to the quality drop (over-sharpening). Here, the framework specifically adapted for the quality assessment of sharpened images and objective metrics comparison in this context is introduced. However, the framework can be adopted in other quality assessment areas as well. The problem of selecting the correct procedure for subjective evaluation was addressed and a subjective test on blurred, sharpened, and over-sharpened images was performed in order to demonstrate the use of the framework. The obtained ground-truth data were used for testing the suitability of state-ofthe- art objective quality metrics for the assessment of sharpened images. The comparison was performed by novel procedure using ROC analyses which is found more appropriate for the task than standard methods. Furthermore, seven possible augmentations of the no-reference S3 metric adapted for sharpened images are proposed. The performance of the metric is significantly improved and also superior over the rest of the tested quality criteria with respect to the subjective data.

There are several standard methods for evaluating the performance of models for objective quality assessment with respect to results of subjective tests. However, all of them suffer from one or more of the following drawbacks: They do not consider the uncertainty in the subjective scores, requiring the models to make certain decision where the correct behavior is not known. They are vulnerable to the quality range of the stimuli in the experiments. In order to compare the models, they require a mapping of predicted values to the subjective scores, thus not comparing the models exactly as they are used in the real scenarios. In this paper, new methodology for objective models performance evaluation is proposed. The method is based on determining the classification abilities of the models considering two scenarios inspired by the real applications. It does not suffer from the previously stated drawbacks and enables to easily evaluate the performance on the data from multiple subjective experiments. Moreover, techniques to determine statistical significance of the performance differences are suggested. The proposed framework is tested on several selected metrics and datasets, showing the ability to provide a complementary information about the models' behavior while being in parallel with other state-of-the-art methods.

We propose a novel binarization method based on a signal reconstruction using an iterative detection network. The algorithm simulates the whole image acquisition process taking into account a point spread function of the imaging system and its noise characteristics. The negative influence of image blur and noise is effectively suppressed by iterative detection network based on the criterion of maximum a posteriori probability. The proposed method was successfully applied to noisy microscopy images. Experiments show that the proposed method due to the noise suppression and deconvolution properties provides for noisy images significantly better results compared to common thresholding techniques. Binarized images obtained by the proposed method can be particularly useful for particle detection and analysis of cell samples.