Objective Prediction of Human Visual Acuity Using Image Quality Metrics

This work addresses the objective prediction of human uncorrected decimal visual acuity, an unsolved challenge due to the contribution of both physical and neural factors. An alternative approach to assess the image quality of the human visual system can be addressed from the image and video processing perspective. Human tolerance to image degradation is quantified by mean opinion scores, and several image quality assessment algorithms are used to maintain, control, and improve the quality of processed images. The aberration map of the eye is used to obtain the degraded theoretical image from a set of natural images. The amount of distortion added by the eye to the natural image was quantified using different image processing metrics, and the correlation between the result of each metric and subjective visual acuity was assessed. The correlation obtained for a model based on a linear combination of the normalized mean square error metric and the feature similarity index metric was very good. It was concluded that the proposed method could be an objective way to determine subjects' monocular and uncorrected decimal visual acuity with low uncertainty.