The Natural Scene derived Spatial Frequency Response (NS-SFR) is a novel camera system performance measure that derives SFRs directly from images of natural scenes and processes them using ISO12233 edge-based SFR (e-SFR) algorithm. NS-SFR is a function of both camera system performance and scene content. It is measured directly from captured scenes, thus eliminating the use of test charts and strict laboratory conditions. The effective system e-SFR can be subsequently estimated from NS-SFRs using statistical analysis and a diverse dataset of scenes. This paper first presents the NS-SFR measuring framework, which locates, isolates, and verifies suitable step-edges from captures of natural scenes. It then details a process for identifying the most likely NS-SFRs for deriving the camera system e-SFR. The resulting estimates are comparable to standard e-SFRs derived from test chart inputs, making the proposed method a viable alternative to the ISO technique, with potential for real-time camera system performance measurements.
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.