A psychovisual color image quality metric integrating both intra and inter channel masking effect

Any process applied to digital images has to be validated by a performance measure. In the compression area, this measure of performance provides a quality measure of the reconstructed images. The use of psychophysical tests to measure the quality is quite time consuming. Therefore, many quality metrics have been defined in order to reach a high correlation degree with the human judgment. In this paper, a perceptually tuned metric based on a wavelet transform and a measure of the intra- and inter-channel visual masking effect is developed. A performance measure is then computed in terms of correlation and robustness to the type of image.