Objective Image Quality Assessment of Color Prints

Measuring the perceived quality of printed images are important to assess the performance of printers and to evaluate technology advancements. Image quality metrics have been proposed to objectively assess the quality of images, and new metrics are continuously proposed. However, applying these metrics to printed images are not straightforward, since they require a digital input. We present a new framework for applying image quality metrics to printed images, including the transformation to a digital format, image registration, and the application of image quality metrics. Evaluation of image quality metrics in the new framework showed that some metrics provide better results for certain quality attributes, which lead to an investigation of the different quality attributes used in the evaluation of color prints. Based on a survey of the existing literature and a psychophysical experiment, we identify and categorize existing image quality attributes to propose a refined selection of meaningful ones for the evaluation of color prints.