1. A method operable on a processing device, having a processor and a memory, tier obtaining a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) image from a MRI system, comprising: acquiring one or more test signals from a MRI system utilizing a test phantom object with known dimensions and characteristics; determining a compensation function that minimizes an error metric that takes a baseline calibration signal from the MRI system and the one or more acquired test signals transformed by the compensation function; determining a noise scale factor based on the plurality of acquired test signals by computing noise statistics in homogeneous areas where true signal intensities are substantially uniform in the one or more test signals; and utilizing the acquired test signals, the calculated compensation function, and the noise scale factor as input parameters to calculate an image quality metric.