Abstract: We recently proposed a region-based measure of image edge profile acutance to characterize the sharpness of a region of interest. In this paper we study the capability of the acutance measure to analyze relative sharpness in the presence of blurring and noise by comparing acutance to other measures of distortion and to subjective evaluation. The purpose of the experiment was to organize an image set in increasing order of sharpness with results obtained by objective image quality measures (acutance, mean squared error, normalized error, and normalized mean squared error) and to compare the results with subjective evaluation. A psychometric experiment was developed to perform sorting according to the subjective notion of sharpness. The region-based image edge profile acutance measure provided results that agree more closely with subjective evaluation of relative sharpness than the other measures studied. The acutance measure also exhibited a good level of immunity to noise, whereas the other measures provided ordering according to noise rather than sharpness. !8
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