Automatic quality assessment for fluorescence microscopy images

Fluorescence microscopy imaging is a constant trade off between signal to noise ratio, total observation time and spatio-temporal resolution due to photo toxicity. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the quality of a fluorescent image acquisition, from a single image, taking into account both signal dependent and signal independent noise. We propose a method for the calculation of the signal to noise ratio globally and locally. We validated our algorithm on real experimental data and data with known simulated noise. Results allow us to conclude that this fully automatic method provides a good quantification of the image quality.