Abstract— Objective methods for assessing perceptual image
quality have traditionally attempted to quantify the visibility
of errors between a distorted image and a reference
image using a variety of known properties of the human
visual system. Under the assumption that human visual
perception is highly adapted for extracting structural information
from a scene, we introduce an alternative framework
for quality assessment based on the degradation of structural
information. As a specific example of this concept,
we develop a Structural Similarity Index and demonstrate
its promise through a set of intuitive examples, as well as
comparison to both subjective ratings and state-of-the-art
objective methods on a database of images compressed with
JPEG and JPEG2000.1
Keywords— Error sensitivity, human visual system (HVS),
image coding, image quality assessment, JPEG, JPEG2000,
perceptual quality, structural information, structural similarity
(SSIM)