Visibility of uncorrelated image noise

In this study, we evaluated the effect that pixel size has upon people’s preferences for images. We used multispectral images of faces as the scene data and simulated the response from sensors with different pixel size while the other sensor parameters were kept constant. Subjects were asked to choose between pairs of images; we found that preference judgments were primarily influenced by the visibility of uncorrelated noise in the images. We used the S-CIELAB metric (ΔE) to predict the visibility of the uncorrelated image noise. The S-CIELAB difference between a test image and an ideal reference image was monotonically related to the preference score.