Perceptually relevant image fidelity

In recent years a number of image fidelity measures have been developed. These measures are designed to predict a person's ability to perceive differences between two nearly identical images. Successful image fidelity measures allow digital imaging developers to replace difficult and time consuming subjective evaluations with automated evaluations. Although a number of image fidelity measures have been developed, no method for evaluating and comparing the accuracy of these measures has been commonly accepted. In this paper we describe a new method for evaluating image fidelity measures. The method involves comparing spatially localized ratings from a human subject with distortion maps generated by an image fidelity measure.