Reliability of Objective Picture Quality Measures

This paper investigates a set of objective picture quality measures for application in still image compression systems and emphasizes the correlation of these measures with subjective picture quality measures. Picture quality is measured using nine different objective picture quality measures and subjectively using Mean Opinion Score (MOS) as measure of perceived picture quality. The correlation between each objective measure and MOS is found. The effects of different image compression algorithms, image contents and compression ratios are assessed. Our results show that some objective measures correlate well with the perceived picture quality for a given compression algorithm but they are not reliable for an evaluation across different algorithms. So, we compared objective picture quality measures across different algorithms and we found measures, which serve well in all tested image compression systems.