Structural and Information Theoretic Approaches to Image Quality Assessment

Digital images and video are prolific in the world today owing to the ease of acquiring, processing, storing and transmitting them. Several common image processing operations such as compression, dithering and printing affect the quality of the image. Advances in sensor and networking technologies, from the internet to wireless networks, has led to a surge of interest in image communication systems. Again, the communication channel tends to distort the image signal passing through it and the quality of the image needs to be closely monitored to meet requirements at the end receiver. The integrity of the image also needs to be preserved, irrespective of the specific display system that is used by the viewer. In this chapter, we describe state of the art objective quality metrics to assess the quality of digital images.