SPIE - Education The Image Pipeline and How It Influences Quality Measurements Based on Existing ISO Standards SC753

When a digital image is captured using a digital still camera, DSC, it needs to be processed. For consumer cameras this processing is done within the camera and covers various steps like dark current subtraction, flare compensation, shading and color compensation, demosaicing, white balancing, tonal and color correction, sharpening, and compression. All of these steps have a significant influence on image quality so it is important to know how image quality can be measured and what standardized methods exist. The course provides the basic methods for each step of the imaging pipeline. While we run several images through a sample pipeline we will alter the algorithms to discover the visual differences and the differences in the measured values using the various test methods. This helps to understand the process and provides a lot of information on how to increase the over all image quality. The course topics include basic review of the image processing pipeline; explanation of the different steps and their basic algorithms; practical image processing using sample images and software; introduction to image quality analysis; discussion on test scenes and visual image analysis; measurement of different image quality aspects like OECF, Dynamic Range, Noise, Resolution, Color Reproduction; explanation of the available free and commercial software; and demonstration of illuminator, test chart, and software based measurements.