Analysis of Natural Scene Derived Spatial Frequency Responses for Estimating Camera ISO12233 Slanted-Edge Performance

The Natural Scene derived Spatial Frequency Response (NS-SFR) framework automatically extracts suitable step-edges from natural pictorial scenes and processes these edges via the edge-based ISO12233 (e-SFR) algorithm. Previously, a novel methodology was presented to estimate the standard e-SFR from NS-SFR data. This paper implements this method using diverse natural scene image datasets from three characterized camera systems. Quantitative analysis was carried out on the system e-SFR estimates to validate accuracy of the method. Both linear and non-linear camera systems were evaluated. To investigate how scene content and dataset size affect system e-SFR estimates, analysis was conducted on entire datasets, as well as subsets of various sizes and scene group types. Results demonstrate that system e-SFR estimates strongly correlate with results from test chart inputs, with accuracy comparable to that of the ISO12233. Further work toward improving and fine-tuning the proposed methodology for practical implementation is discussed.