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A new block-based multi-metric fusion (BMMF) approach is proposed for perceptual image quality assessment. The proposed BMMF scheme automatically detects image content and distortion types in a block via machine learning, which is motivated by the observation that the performance of an image quality metric is highly influenced by these factors. Locally, image block content is classified into three types; namely, smooth, edge and texture. Image distortion is detected and grouped into five types. An appropriate image quality metric is adopted for each block by considering its content and distortion types, and then all block-based quality metrics are fused to result in one final score. Furthermore, a corrected version of BMMF is derived for a specific group of distortions based on image complexity analysis. The proposed BMMF scheme is tested on TID database with its Spearman Correlation equal to 0.9471, which outperforms today's state-of-the-art image quality metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]