Subjective Quality Assessment of Thermal Infrared Images

Thermal infrared images (TIIs) can be distorted by multiple factors, resulting in noise, low contrast, limited dynamic range, and fuzziness, which greatly impede their usefulness. It is crucial to evaluate the quality of TIIs. Unfortunately, there have been very few attempts to study this problem. In this study, we collected 1,000 authentically distorted TIIs using thermal infrared acquisition equipment and conducted strict subjective experiments to obtain a thermal infrared image quality assessment (IQA) database. Each image’s quality score was obtained under strict scoring rules. Finally, we investigated the feasibility of several no-reference (NR) IQA methods in quality assessment of TIIs. We found that existing NR-IQA methods achieve ordinary performance in such a task, and there is an urgent need to develop a specific IQA methods for TIIs. The findings together with the constructed database are expected to pave the way for the development of more advanced IQA methods for further development of this field.