Performance Measures
Various metrics are used to evaluate the performance of Image compression algorithms.
The effectiveness of lossless compression schemes can be described using a relative measure, "compression ratio" or by
describing an absolute measure, the "bit rate" of an image. The true effectiveness of the compression scheme may be
better indicated by comparing the encoded bit rate with a measure of how much information is "really" encoded in the
image. One such measure is the "entropy" of the image, a term from information theory [14] which is essentially the
average amount of information per pixel value in the image. The "zero order" entropy does not take into account any
information contained in surrounding pixels[13]. The performance of an image compression technique must be evaluated
by considering different aspects.
Compression efficiency (Compression Ratio/Factor, bit per pixel bpp or bit rate)
Computational cost
Fidelity i.e, Objective and Subjective
Image quality (Distortion Measure)