A practical residual block-based no-reference quality metric for neutron radiographic images.

Objective image quality metric is a challenging problem for neutron radiography due to the lack of reference images. The existing no-reference image quality metric (NR-IQM) method designed for neutron radiographic images (NRIs) still exists two main shortcomings. Firstly, the limited L/D of the collimator would inevitably lead to geometric blur in the NRIs. However, the special distortion type of mixed Poisson–Gaussian noise is merely considered but ignores the blur distortion. Secondly, the distortion levels of Poisson noise added to an image cannot be adjusted. In order to address these two issues, a more practical objective NR-IQM method is proposed to predict the perceptual quality of NRIs in this paper. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method shows good consistency with the quality of authentic NRIs and also performs well in reflecting the tiny quality difference of enhanced NRIs, thus demonstrating its application potential in neutron radiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]