New Image Compression Artifact Measure Using Wavelets

Traditional objective metrics for the quality measure of coded images such as the mean squared error (MSE) and the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) do not correlate with the subjective human visual experience well, since they do not take human perception into account. Quantification of artifacts resulted from lossy image compression techniques is studied based on a human visual system (HVS) model and the time-space localization property of the wavelet transform is exploited to simulate HVS in this research. As a result of our research, a new image quality measure by using the wavelet basis function is proposed. This new metric works for a wide variety of compression artifacts. Experimental results are given to demonstrate that it is more consistent with human subjective ranking.