Patent ID: 8660364

Claim:
A method for determining a measure of quality for an image Y, characterizing a similarity between the image Y and a reference image X having same resolution, the method comprising: (a) applying an N level multiresolution decomposition, comprising levels 1, 2, . . . i, i+1, . . . N, to the image X and the image Y respectively, to produce: for each level i, with i ranging from 1 to N−1, intermediate subbands of the image X and the image Y for processing at level i+1; and for the level N, approximation subbands containing respective main contents of the image X and the image Y, and respective detail subbands containing edges of the image X and the image Y; (b) applying an image quality metric (IQM) to the approximation subband of the image X and the approximation subband of the image Y to produce an approximation quality measure characterizing similarity between the main content of the image X and the main content of the image Y; (c) at at least one level i, with i ranging from levels 1 to N−1, aggregating the intermediate subbands and the detail subbands, for the image X and the image Y respectively, to produce respective edge maps for the image X and the image Y, characterizing edges of the image X and the image Y respectively; (d) applying the IQM to the edge maps of the image X and the image Y to produce an edge quality measure characterizing similarity between the edges of the image X and the image Y; and (e) processing the approximation quality measure and the edge quality measure to determine the measure of quality.