An SVD-based grayscale image quality measure for local and global assessment

The important criteria used in subjective evaluation of distorted images include the amount of distortion, the type of distortion, and the distribution of error. An ideal image quality measure should, therefore, be able to mimic the human observer. We present a new grayscale image quality measure that can be used as a graphical or a scalar measure to predict the distortion introduced by a wide range of noise sources. Based on singular value decomposition, it reliably measures the distortion not only within a distortion type at different distortion levels, but also across different distortion types. The measure was applied to five test images (airplane, boat, goldhill, Lena, and peppers) using six types of distortion (JPEG, JPEG 2000, Gaussian blur, Gaussian noise, sharpening, and DC-shifting), each with five distortion levels. Its performance is compared with PSNR and two recent measures.