Information as a quality metric for high-resolution imaging

The resolution of digital images is limited to the camera's sampling interval, and their visual quality depends on the level of degradations from acquisition, through quantization, transmission and digital filtering, to display. This paper presents the information metric as an effective image quality assessment tool for high-resolution digital imaging-systems design. It shows its capabilities for any set of design constraints by assessing the electro/optical/digital imaging process as a unified system. It ties improvements in resolution and clarity of the final image representation to increases of the acquired information, by correlating the loss of resolution to the loss of information in the assessed system.