User-oriented image quality assessment has become a key factor in wireless multimedia communications. In particular, perceptual quality assessment methods are required to measure the overall perceived service quality based on the grading given by human subjects. This paper focuses on the development of a reduced-reference perceptual image quality metric, which can be applied for in-service quality monitoring and link adaptation purposes. In contrast to the conventional image fidelity metrics such as the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), the proposed hybrid image quality metric (HIQM) takes the human perception into account. In addition, HIQM does not rely on the availability of the full reference of the original image at the receiver.