The performance of reduced reference (RR) image quality assessment depends on the feature extraction and sparse representation of the image.Wavelet-based contourlet transform(WBCT)

a non-redundant sparse representation of image

can effectively reflect visual characteristics of the image

such that it is often used to capture the variation of visual perception to result from image distortion.Hereby

an objective image quality assessment metric is proposed by combining the WBCT with RR model.Experimental results illustrate that the proposed method has a good consistency with the subjective assessment of human beings

thus can be used to describe the visual perception of the image effectively.