Perceptual quality assessment of SAR image compression

Image quality assessment (IQA) is of fundamental importance for image compression applications. Traditional IQA measures for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image compression do not consider the properties of the human visual system (HVS). Since human beings are still the final users in most SAR image applications, the objective evaluation coordinate to human perception is the most acceptable and practical IQA method. In this article, we carried out an extensive subjective quality assessment experiment in which four different SAR image compression techniques and a total of 300 test images were estimated by 100 human observers. The test result provides a straightforward comparison of these four compression methods. Then the performances of seven classical objective IQA algorithms were validated based on obtained subjective evaluations. Moreover, we propose a novel objective approach by taking into account the HVS and SAR image characteristics. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed metric correlates well with human perception for SAR image compression.