Manuscript received February 21, 2025; revised April 1, 2025; accepted June 6, 2025; published December 19, 2025.

Abstract—Lossy coding schemes which generates distortions in the images/videos are used by video encoders to meet the bandwidth requirements. Similarly, preprocessing, transmission, and post-processing steps generates additional artifacts. Measuring these artifacts is crucial for the development of digital video systems. However, there are many issues/challenges while measuring the quality of an image/video efficiently and effectively. Many existing research papers present the issues/challenges while doing quality assessment. However, existing work does not present all the issues and challenges comprehensively and discusses either one or two kinds of issues during quality assessment. However, this work presents a comprehensive overview of all kinds of issues & challenges while measuring image/video quality, i.e., ranging from subjective to objective, using 3D video and new coding tools, and the effect of one type of distortion on other types of distortion, issues due to subjective databases, etc. The paper also describes issues/challenges related to Quality of Experience (QoE) by the end users, issues in real time streaming (e.g., edge & cloud based streaming, etc.), issues in deep learning, machine learning, artificial intelligence generated & enhanced contents, etc. The work also discusses other miscellaneous issues/challenges and recommends for future directions based on the current work understanding. Overall, this work will guide the research community in taking into account these issues and developing more efficient ways of measuring image/video quality, along with developing efficient encoders and 3D encoding methods for the further development of digital video systems.

Keywords—issues/challenges, quality, image/video, artifacts

Cite: Muhammad Uzair, "Image/Video Quality Assessment Challenges: A Comprehensive Review," Journal of Image and Graphics, Vol. 13, No. 6, pp. 651-672, 2025.

Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY-4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.