Application of blind image quality assessment metrics to pulsed thermography

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the application of Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) metrics to pulsed thermography. Two BIQA were used to subsample a sequence of images acquired using Pulse Thermography (PT). The experiments show that the sequences subsampled using BIQA significantly improve the results when applied to metallic samples but fail to capture informative features on composite materials. On metallic samples, when the PCT is applied, an average improvement of 139% of the Contrast to Noise Ratio (CNR) score is observed, on the sequences subsampled, compared with the entire sequence. Nonetheless, the CNR shows that processing the entire data sequence offers 240% improvement compared with subsampled sequences on composite materials.