Image quality assessment based on DCT subband similarity

Measuring image quality becomes increasingly important due to the many applications involving digital imaging and communication. Image quality assessment aims to develop a visual quality metric that correlates well with human visual perception. In this paper, we present a full-reference image quality assessment technique based on DCT Subbands Similarity (DSS). The proposed technique exploits important characteristics of human visual perception by measuring change in structural information in subbands in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain and weighting the quality estimates for these subbands. The proposed technique was tested with public image datasets and shows higher correlation with subjective results than state-of-the-art techniques. Another advantage of the proposed technique is its low computational cost.