Tag Archives: sfrmat

MTF Mapper vs sfrmat3

Over the last couple of years I’ve been using Frans van den Bergh‘s excellent open source MTF Mapper to measure the Modulation Transfer Function of imaging systems off a slanted edge target, as you may have seen in these pages.  As long as one understands how to get the most out of it I find it a solid product that gives reliable results, with MTF50 typically well within 2% of actual in less than ideal real-world situations (see below).  I had little to compare it to other than to tests published by gear testing sites:  they apparently mostly use a commercial package called Imatest for their slanted edge readings – and it seemed to correlate well with those.

Then recently Jim Kasson pointed out sfrmat3, the matlab program written by Peter Burns who is a slanted edge method expert who worked at Kodak and was a member of the committee responsible for ISO12233, the resolution and spatial frequency response standard for photography.  sfrmat3 is considered to be a solid implementation of the standard and many, including Imatest, benchmark against it – so I was curious to see how MTF Mapper 0.4.1.6 would compare.  It did well.

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