IEEE Signal Processing Letters, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 81-84, March 2002

 

A Universal Image Quality Index

 Zhou Wang and Alan C. Bovik

Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712-1084

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Abstract: We propose a new universal objective image quality index, which is easy to calculate and applicable to various image processing applications. Instead of using traditional error summation methods, the proposed index is designed by modeling any image distortion as a combination of three factors: loss of correlation, luminance distortion, and contrast distortion. Although the new index is mathematically defined and no human visual system model is explicitly employed, experiments on various image distortion types show that it exhibits surprising consistency with subjective quality measurement. It performs significantly better than the widely used distortion metric mean squared error.

Index Terms – image quality measurement, human visual system (HVS), mean squared error (MSE)