A Subjective Study on a New Sharpness Informed Class of Metrics

Abstract

Perceptual loss functions in Deep Neural Network (DNN) deblurring architectures improve the overall quality of restored images. However, few focus on explicitly targeting sharpness in the restorations. We conduct a subjective study of models trained with and without losses which explicitly target sharpness using a four-protocol approach, exploring preferred sharpness levels and effects on image quality. We introduce a novel dataset of images with uniform sharpness increments along with Difference Mean Opinion Scores (DMOS). Additionally, we propose a novel class of Sharpness Informed (SI) Image Quality Assessment (IQA) metrics which properly penalize over-sharpening. Our new SI-PSNR metric outperforms all other PSNR variants in terms of correlation statistics on IQA benchmarking datasets. We show that, on average, images restored using a sharpness-aware composite loss are preferred in 67% of binarized comparisons, as opposed to losses that do not explicitly target sharpness.

Accepted at IEEE MMSP 2026, 6 pages