Patent ID: 7079704

Claim:
A method for estimating the sharpness quality of input-video data, the method comprising the steps of: converting said input-video data into corresponding digital-image data comprised of pixel values; generating Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) from at least some of said pixel values and computing an average FFT on said generated FFT; calculating a statistical reference using said average FFT; and, producing an image-quality metric from said calculated statistical reference, wherein the statistical-reference calculating step comprises the step of calculating kurtosis using said average FFT, and wherein said image-quality metric (SH) is produced by calculating an offset of said kurtosis according to one of the following equations: SH= 2.5546 Ln (kurtosis)−3.8496, and SH ( var ) 0.485 /100, where SH represents said image-quality metric and var represents the variance as follows: var = ∑ i = 1 N ⁢ ( Y i - Y _ ) 2 ( N - 1 ) . wherein {overscore (Y)} represents an average FFT, Y i represents an individual value of said generated FFT, and N represents the size of said generated FFT.