Practical Image Quality Metric Applied to Image Coding

Perceptual image coding requires an effective image quality metric, yet most of the existing metrics are complex and can hardly guide the compression effectively. This paper proposes a practical full-reference metric with consideration of the texture masking effect and contrast sensitivity function. The metric is capable of evaluating typical image impairments in real-world applications and can achieve the comparable performance as the state-of-the-art metrics on the publicly available subjectively-rated image databases. Due to its simplicity, the metric is embedded into JPEG image coding to ensure a better perceptual rate-distortion performance.