Stereoscopic images are widely used to enhance the viewing experience of three-dimensional (3D) imaging and communication system. In this paper, we propose an image feature and disparity dependent quality evaluation metric, which incorporates human visible system characteristics. We believe perceived distortions and disparity of any stereoscopic image are strongly dependent on local features, such as edge (i.e., nonplane areas of an image) and nonedge (i.e., plane areas of an image) areas within the image. Therefore, a no-reference perceptual quality assessment method is developed for JPEG coded stereoscopic images based on segmented local features of distortions and disparity. Local feature information such as edge and non-edge area based relative disparity estimation, as well as the blockiness and the edge distortion within the block of images are evaluated in this method. Subjective stereo image database is used for evaluation of the metric. The subjective experiment results indicate that our metric has sufficient prediction performance. 1. Introduction Nowadays, three-dimensional (3D) stereo media is becoming immersive media to increase visual experience as natural in various applications ranging from entertainment [1] to more specialized applications such as remote education [2], robot navigation [3], medical applications like body exploration [4], and therapeutic purposes [5]. There are many alternative technologies for 3D image/video display and communication, including holographic, volumetric, and stereoscopic; stereoscopic image/video seems to be the most developed technology at the present [6]. Stereoscopic image consists of two images (left and right views) captured by closely located (approximately the distance between two eyes) two cameras. These views constitute a stereo pair and can be perceived as a virtual view in 3D by human observers with the rendering of corresponding view points. Although the technologies required for 3D image are emerging rapidly, the effect of these technologies as well as image compression on the perceptual quality of 3D viewing has not been thoroughly studied. Therefore, perceptual 3D image quality is an important issue to assess the performance of all 3D imaging applications. There are several signal processing operations that have been designed for stereoscopic images [7] and some researchers are still working to develop a new standard for efficient multiview image/video coding [8]. They believe the image compression technique that used in 2D image material can also be applied independently on the left and
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