Quality assessment of mobile and wireless multimedia services including image and video applications has gained increased attention in recent years as a means of facilitating efficient radio resource management. In particular, approaches that utilize perceptual-based metrics are becoming more dominant, as conventional fidelity metrics such as the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) may not correlate well with quality as perceived by the human observer. In this paper, we focus on the error sensitivity analysis for images given in the wireless JPEG2000 (JPWL) format using perceptual quality metrics. Specifically, the perceptual quality improvements obtained by progressively decoding an increasing number of image packets are examined. It is shown that the considered perceptual quality metrics exploiting structural image features may accompany or replace the PSNR-based error sensitivity description (ESD) marker segment in the wireless JPEG2000 standard. This addition will increase the effectiveness of the ESD marker segment as it facilitates the communication of reduced-reference information about the image quality from the transmitter to the receiver. In addition, the proposed approach can be used to guide the design of preferential error control coding schemes, link adaptation techniques, and selective retransmission of packets with respect to their contribution to overall quality as perceived by humans.