  Although color is a fundamental feature of human visual perception, it has
been largely unexplored in the reduced-reference (RR) image quality assessment
(IQA) schemes. In this paper, we propose a natural scene statistic (NSS)
method, which efficiently uses this information. It is based on the statistical
deviation between the steerable pyramid coefficients of the reference color
image and the degraded one. We propose and analyze the multivariate generalized
Gaussian distribution (MGGD) to model the underlying statistics. In order to
quantify the degradation, we develop and evaluate two measures based
respectively on the Geodesic distance between two MGGDs and on the closed-form
of the Kullback Leibler divergence. We performed an extensive evaluation of
both metrics in various color spaces (RGB, HSV, CIELAB and YCrCb) using the TID
2008 benchmark and the FRTV Phase I validation process. Experimental results
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework to achieve a good
consistency with human visual perception. Furthermore, the best configuration
is obtained with CIELAB color space associated to KLD deviation measure.
