Subjective and Objective Assesment of Visual Image Quality Metrics and Still Image Codecs

Summary form only given. Objective quality assessment of lossy image compression codecs have become an important part of the recent call of the JPEG committee for advanced image coding. We evaluated JPEG with Huffman and arithmetic coding option, a visual and PSNR optimal JPEG2000 version, H.264/AVC and the recently proposed HDPhoto format by Microsoft. For objective evaluation, we use a color version of the M-SSIM metric and the high-dynamic range version of VDP. The results obtained from these tests are compared to subjective testing obtained from an ordering test run by 15 observers in two sessions. Subjective results are compiled to Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and passed through a Kurtosis test to verify their validity and to reject outliers.