A universal color image quality metric

We extend a recently introduced universal grayscale image quality index to a newly developed perceptually decorrelated color space. The resulting color image quality index quantifies the distortion of a processed color image relative to its original version. We evaluated the new color image quality metric through observer experiments in which subjects ranked images according to perceived distortion. The metric correlates strongly with human perception and can therefore be used to assess the performance of color image coding and compression schemes, color image enhancement algorithms, synthetic color image generators, and color image fusion schemes.