Simple and effective image quality assessment based on edge enhanced mean square error

Simple and effective image quality assessment (IQA) method is very desirable in many image and video processing applications, such as coding, transmission, restoration and enhancement. Classic pixel absolute error based objective IQA metrics such as mean square error (MSE) and corresponding peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) are widely used for various applications due to low computation and clear physical meanings, but have also been criticized for poorly correlated with subjective evaluation. Inspired by that human visual system (HVS) is more sensitive to image local edge distortion than flat or texture areas, in this paper, we propose a novel edge enhanced MSE (EE-MSE) to emphasize edge distortion effects on IQA. Experimental results on LIVE database release 2 show that the proposed EE-MSE IQA metric is competitive with state-of-the-art HVS-based IQA metrics, while has lower computational complexity and is more suitable for optimization task.