We describe an innovative methodology for determining the quality of digital images. The method is based on measuring the variance of the expected entropy of a given image upon a set of predefined directions. Entropy can be calculated on a local basis by using a spatial/spatial-frequency distribution as an approximation for a probability density function. The generalized Rényi entropy and the normalized pseudo-Wigner distribution (PWD) have been selected for this purpose. As a consequence, a pixel-by-pixel entropy value can be calculated, and therefore entropy histograms can be generated as well. The variance of the expected entropy is measured as a function of the directionality, and it has been taken as an anisotropy indicator. For this purpose, directional selectivity can be attained by using an oriented 1-D PWD implementation. Our main purpose is to show how such an anisotropy measure can be used as a metric to assess both the fidelity and quality of images. Experimental results show that an index such as this presents some desirable features that resemble those from an ideal image quality function, constituting a suitable quality index for natural images. Namely, in-focus, noise-free natural images have shown a maximum of this metric in comparison with other degraded, blurred, or noisy versions. This result provides a way of identifying in-focus, noise-free images from other degraded versions, allowing an automatic and nonreference classification of images according to their relative quality. It is also shown that the new measure is well correlated with classical reference metrics such as the peak signal-to-noise ratio.

Diatoms, a kind of algae microorganisms with several species, are quite useful for water quality determination, one of the hottest topics in applied biology nowadays. At the same time, deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNN) are becoming an extensively used technique for image classification in a variety of problems. This paper approaches diatom classification with this technique, in order to demonstrate whether it is suitable for solving the classification problem. An extensive dataset was specifically collected (80 types, 100 samples/type) for this study. The dataset covers different illumination conditions and it was computationally augmented to more than 160,000 samples. After that, CNNs were applied over datasets pre-processed with different image processing techniques. An overall accuracy of 99% is obtained for the 80-class problem and different kinds of images (brightfield, normalized). Results were compared to previous presented classification techniques with different number of samples. As far as the authors know, this is the first time that CNNs are applied to diatom classification.