  This paper deals with color image quality assessment in the reduced-reference
framework based on natural scenes statistics. In this context, we propose to
model the statistics of the steerable pyramid coefficients by a Multivariate
Generalized Gaussian distribution (MGGD). This model allows taking into account
the high correlation between the components of the RGB color space. For each
selected scale and orientation, we extract a parameter matrix from the three
color components subbands. In order to quantify the visual degradation, we use
a closed-form of Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD) between two MGGDs. Using
"TID 2008" benchmark, the proposed measure has been compared with the most
influential methods according to the FRTV1 VQEG framework. Results demonstrates
its effectiveness for a great variety of distortion type. Among other benefits
this measure uses only very little information about the original image.
