Automatic processing of Imatest charts

It turns out that people sometimes want to process an image of an Imatest SFRplus type chart in MTF Mapper. Or at the very least, I have received requests about this.

When I first released MTF Mapper, I took it as a given that people would just print out the MTF Mapper charts if they wanted to use MTF Mapper. In the meantime I have gotten wiser, and I now know how hard (or expensive?) it is to print high-quality test charts. So it actually makes perfect sense to use a good quality chart that you already own (e.g., an SFRplus chart) with MTF Mapper.

Unfortunately the design of the SFRplus-style charts includes a black bar that runs through the top of the top row of target squares, like in this example:

An example of an SFRplus chart. I blatantly copied this example from Imatest's website (please don't sue me).

This black bar causes MTF Mapper to see the entire top row of squares plus the black bar as a single object, and since this compound object does not resemble a square, it ignores it. The same thing happens with the black bar at the bottom of the chart. As a result, MTF Mapper only processes the interior squares, like so:

Ignore the actual MTF50 values, but do note that only the interior square targets were detected automatically

Other than the obvious spurious detections on the non-target squares (which you can cover up with post-its or such if necessary) the output is usable, but you lose the top and bottom rows of squares, which is not ideal.

A simple solution is to just crop your image to exclude the bars, and then to process the cropped image with MTF Mapper's "-b" option. This works, but it is rather clunky. So I added a convenience feature that will do this automatically.

You can choose the new File/Open Imatest image(s) option in the GUI, or you can add the --imatest-chart option if you use the command-line interface. Because the gray target squares of the SFRplus chart cover more of the white background than a typical MTF Mapper chart, you probably have to adjust the "Threshold" value (-t on the CLI, or under Settings/Preferences/Advanced in the GUI) a little to detect all the target squares. The default Threshold is 0.55, and bumping it down to 0.4 should work a little better. For our test image above, we then get this:

Much better; all target squares detected

Note that the top edges of the top row of squares are tagged with "N/A" rather than MTF50 values; this is just MTF Mapper's way to indicate that these edges do not represent valid measurements. If you are parsing the "edge_mtf_values.txt" file produced by the "-q" output option, these edges will have an MTF50 value of 1.0 (which is an impossible / invalid MTF50 value). Or you could identify them by their pixel coordinates, which is probably the better way.

This feature is available from MTF Mapper 0.6.21 onward.

Cropped single edge images now handled more elegantly in the GUI

A while back I wrote a post that described the "--single-roi" option of MTF Mapper. The "--single-roi" mode specifically allows you to feed MTF Mapper with images that have already been cropped to contain only a single edge, i.e., they look like this:

From MTF Mapper 0.6.20 onwards, you can now use the menu option File/Open single edge image(s) to load images that look like the one pictured above. Note that by opening an image using this new menu option MTF Mapper will automatically enable the outputs that make sense (Annotated image output, with the ability to click on edges to view the SFR curve), while silently ignoring all the output types that do not make sense if you only have one edge.