Visual multipoles for quantifying raggedness and sharpness of images

At the recent SPIE meeting on Human Vision, Visual Processing and Digital Display (1989) it was clear that many display engineers are interested in the properties of the human visual system. Knowledge about human performance is being used both for improving a metric to measure image quality and also to improve data compression algorithms. It was apparent from that meeting that the languages used by the display engineers and the vision researchers have not fully meshed. The present meeting on applied vision provides an excellent forum for further discussion and cross-fertilization between the groups and the present paper is offered in that spirit. This paper is an outgrowth of our psychophysical experiments on the detection of blur and the detection of misalignment as a function of contrast. In the Discussion we will describe the relevance of this research for perceived image quality and for compression algorithms.