An image quality assessment and restoration system may include a processor and a memory storing instructions to receive an input image, receive a predetermined number of parameter candidates, generate a reconstructed image from the input image for each parameter candidate, sort the reconstructed images by the overall comparative quality between them and determine the best reconstructed image, calculate the overall comparative qualities between the remaining reconstructed images and the best reconstructed image, eliminate any parameter candidates that are suboptimal based on the calculated overall comparative quality, iteratively generate and sort additional reconstructed images and eliminate suboptimal parameter candidates until each of the remaining parameter candidates is converged, and output the converged parameters for use in image restoration. The overall comparative quality may depend upon the local gradient-based structure information and/or the global texture quality information.