Due to the fast evolving technologies and the increasing importance of Social Media, the camera is one of the most important components of today's mobile phones. Nowadays, smartphones are taking over a big share of the compact camera market. A simple reason for this might be revealed by the famous quote: "The best camera is the one that's with you". But with the vast choice of devices and great promises of manufacturers, there is a demand to characterize image quality and performance in very simple terms in order to provide information that helps choosing the best-suited device. The current existing evaluation systems are either not entirely objective or are under development and haven't reached a useful level yet. Therefore the industry itself has gotten together and created a new objective quality evaluation system named Valued Camera eXperience (VCX). It is designed to reflect the user experience regarding the image quality and the performance of a camera in a mobile device. Members of the initiative so fare are: Apple, Huawei, Image Engineering, LG, Mediatec, Nomicam, Oppo, TCL, Vivo, and Vodafone.
Right now there are at least three publicly known ranking systems for cell phones (CPIQ [IEEE P1858, in preparation, DxOmark, VCX) that try to tell us which camera phone provides the best image quality. Now that IEEE is about to publish the P1858 standard with currently only 6 Image quality parameters the question arises how many parameters are needed to characterize a camera in a current cell phone and how important is each factor for the perceived quality. For testing the importance of a factor the IEEE cellphone image quality group (CPIQ) has created psychophysical studies for all 6 image quality factors that are described in the first version of IEEE P1858. That way a connection between the physical measurement of the image quality aspect and the perceived quality can be made.