Blocking Artifacts Measurement Based on the Human Visual System

The block-based DCT image compression methods usually result in discontinuities called blocking artifacts at the boundaries of blocks due to the coarse quantization. A measurement of blocking artifacts based on Human Vision System (HVS) is proposed. This method separates the blocking effects from the original edges in the image by an adaptive edge detection based on local activity and luminance masking. The blocking artifacts in the non-edge area and on the edge are calculated separately. The weighted sum is regarded as the evaluation result. Simulation results show that the proposed measurement is robust for different kind of images, and has the general performance of image quality evaluation metric.