An effective and efficient visual quality index based on local edge gradients

The structural similarity index measure is a well known and widely used full reference visual quality index. In this paper we introduce a new full reference visual quality index based on local edges and edge gradients in the wavelet domain. The proposed metric corresponds better to human judgement and is more efficient, in terms of computational complexity, than the structural similarity index measure. Furthermore, the proposed metric is more efficient than other state of the art metrics and surpasses them for certain visual impairment classes.