A full-reference methodfor objective assessment of image quality is presented. The approach aims at achieving an accurate characterization of the behavior of noise-reduction filters for color digital pictures. The proposed technique consists in the evaluation of a vector error whose components take into account key features such as noise cancellation and detail preservation affecting the luminance and chroma information of the image. Application examples dealing with different kinds of noise distributions are discussed. Results of computer simulations show that the proposed approach can be used to validate techniques for image denoising without the limitations of scalar image quality measurements and without resorting to visual inspection.
