Full-Reference Image Quality Metrics: Classification and Evaluation

Abstract

The wide variety of distortions that images are subject to during acquisition, processing, storage, and reproduction can degrade their perceived quality. Since subjective evaluation is time-consuming, expensive, and resource-intensive, objective methods of evaluation have been proposed. One type of these methods, image quality (IQ) metrics, have become very popular and new metrics are proposed continuously. This paper aims to give a survey of one class of metrics, full-reference IQ metrics. First, these IQ metrics were classified into different groups. Second, further IQ metrics from each group were selected and evaluated against six state-of-the-art IQ databases.