Perceptual visual quality metrics: A survey

Visual quality evaluation has numerous uses in practice, and also plays a central role in shaping many visual processing algorithms and systems, as well as their implementation, optimization and testing. In this paper, we give a systematic, comprehensive and up-to-date review of perceptual visual quality metrics (PVQMs) to predict picture quality according to human perception. Several frequently used computational modules (building blocks of PVQMs) are discussed. These include signal decomposition, just-noticeable distortion, visual attention, and common feature and artifact detection. Afterwards, different types of existing PVQMs are presented, and further discussion is given toward feature pooling, viewing condition, computer-generated signal and visual attention. Six often-used image metrics (namely SSIM, VSNR, IFC, VIF, MSVD and PSNR) are also compared with seven public image databases (totally 3832 test images). We highlight the most significant research work for each topic and provide the links to the extensive relevant literature. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.