From Full-Reference to No-Reference in Quality Assessment of Printed Images

Measuring visual quality of printed media is important as printed products play an essential role in every day life. The image quality assessment has been an active research topic in digital image processing, but adapting the developed methods to measuring visual quality of printed media has been considered rarely and is not straightforward. In this work, different methods for the quality assessment of printed images are considered. First, the so called full-reference approach, where the original image with ideal quality is known, is presented. After that, the feasibility of using the reference-based approach for printed image quality assessments is discussed and problems related to the use of a digital reference image as the basis of the print quality analysis are shown. As a novel solution, a no-reference quality assessment approach is proposed. The solution based on a Bayesian network model of print quality is presented and its quantitative results are reported by using subjective data.