User-oriented image quality assessment has become a key factor in multimedia communications as a means of monitoring perceptual service quality. However, existing image quality metrics such as Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) are inappropriate for in-service quality monitoring since they require the original image to be available at the receiver. Although PSNR and others are objective metrics, they are not based on human visual perception and are typically designed to measure the fidelity. On the other hand, the human visual system (HVS) is more sensitive to perceptual quality than fidelity. In order to overcome these problems, we propose a novel objective reduced-reference hybrid image quality metric (RR-HIQM) that accounts for the human visual perception and does not require a reference image at the receiver. This metric is based on the combination of several image artifact measures. The result is a single number, which represents overall image quality.