Quality Estimation of Image Sequence for Automatic Target Recognition
自动目标识别中的图像序列质量评价方法

Image quality estimation is an important part of performance evaluation for Automatic Target Recognition (ATR). Traditional image metrics are focused on single image, and there is no valid method to estimate the quality of image sequence. According to the above problem, this paper proposes the concept “Inter-Frame Change Degree of Target (IFCDT)” which is used for quantitatively describing image sequence quality for the first time. There are three key elements in the formula of the proposed metric, which embody the information of inter-frame change of target image texture, inter-frame change of target size and inter-frame change of target position respectively. To validate this image sequence metric, this paper designs an experiment for analyzing the relationship of IFCDT and ATR algorithm performance, while the samples of this experiment are actual target image sequences. The experiment result shows that there is a good monotone relationship between the image sequence metric and algorithm actual performance. Therefore, it can be concluded that the metric is a valid criterion to evaluate the quality of target image sequence.