New Image Quality Metric Using the Harris Response

Image degradation deforms the structure of an image. Thus, to evaluate the quality of an image is equivalent to measuring the degree of deformation of the structure of the image. In this letter, we propose a new image quality metric based on the Harris response, which is computed from the gradient information matrix and its eigenvalues. When an image is degraded by image compression, noise, transmission error, and so on, gradient information of the image is changed, causing the Harris response to change. Therefore, the degree of change in the Harris response of the image is related to the quality degradation of the image. Experimental results with the laboratory for image and video engineering data set show the effectiveness of the proposed quality metric.