US Patent 9613258 Image quality assessment

This disclosure concerns image quality assessment. In particular, there is described a computer implemented method, software, and computer for assessing the quality of an image. For example but not limited to, quality of the image of a face indicates the suitability of the image for use in face recognition. The invention comprises determining (112) a similarity of features of two or more sub-images of the image (608) to a model (412) of the object which is based on multiple training images (612) of multiple different objects of that type. The model (412) is comprised of sub-models (406) and each sub-model (406) corresponds to a sub-image of the image (608). Determining similarity is based on the similarity of features of each sub-image to features modelled by the corresponding sub-model. It is an advantage that no input parameters are required for quality assessment since the quality of the image can be determined from only the similarity between the image and the same, therefore single generic, model.