Abstract: A novel image quality assessment algorithm based on property of HVS was proposed to evaluate the quality of image The algorithm exploits the important property of HVS such as multi-channel structure, masking effect and band -pass property of contrast sensitivity. The proposed algorithm can be summarized to three steps: firstly, the muli-channel behavior of HVS can be simulated after decomposing the original image to subband images by contourlet transform in MGA. Secondly, a model is employed to evaluate the visual error between the reference image and the distorted image in each decomposed subband. Finally, the image quality evaluation results are calculated from the visual error weighted factor which is the comparing results of CSF in various subband. The assessment was tested by using the LIVE image database .The result shows that the proposed algorithm is better than PSNR and SSIM in stability and it correlates well with the judgment of human observers.