Talk:Peak signal-to-noise ratio

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How is this different from regular SNR? — Omegatron 03:06, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Omegatron, by regular SNR I suppose you mean (average signal power)/(average noise power). That is usefully calculable for signals that have constant average power, such as AM or FM radio signals (audio has no DC component). Video is an example of a signal that does not have constant average power but has constant peak power.Cuddlyable3 07:17, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] simplify

So is higher or lower PSNR better? Can someone add this to the article? Daniel.Cardenas 23:09, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

  • A higher PSNR would be better, to further extend on this a PSNR of 100 would be exactly identical to the original. 71.183.91.117 02:54, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Ahem... Why would PSNR 100 be identity? It is just a very good signal, but noisy nontheless. If you mean identical for all practical purposes, I would agree, but choosing 100 suggests that this is a special value like 100%, which it is not. -- 06:38, 7 November 2007 (UTC)


A higher PSNR is indeed better. To see this don't take what one says as granted but rather try to understand the underlying equations, they are not difficult. The MSE is basically the difference between the original and reconstructed image pixels, if the image is compared to itself (perfect recontruction or identical) then the MSE will be 0 as the difference between all pixels and their counterparts in the reconstruction will be zero. Now in the PSNR calculation we are dividing by the MSE, now a MSE of zero gives us an undefined PSNR, however if you think of it in terms of approaching zero rather than zero itself then the PSNR increases as the MSE approaches zero. That is the smaller the number on the denominator of the division, the larger the result. Thus I would have to say that a PSNR of 100 is far from correct for an identical image, a PSNR of infinity (or undefined to be mathematically correct) defines an image identical to the original. Publications on wireless image transmission quality define PSNR values of 20 dB or 25 dB for adequate image quality[1] [2]. I would say 30 dB to 40 dB are of quite good quality from my own work but this was for a uni assignment so you are to take it with a pinch of salt until you try it yourself. Shall I add this description to the main article? Keep in mind I'm still a newbie at Wikipedia. Theclem54 (talk) 04:47, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

  1. ^ Xiangjun, L., & Jianfei, C. ROBUST TRANSMISSION OF JPEG2000 ENCODED IMAGES OVER PACKET LOSS CHANNELS. ICME 2007 (pp. 947-950). School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University.
  2. ^ Boulgouris, N. V., Thomos, N., & Strintzis, M. G. (2006, January). Optimized Transmission of JPEG2000 Streams Over Wireless Channels. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing , 15 (1).