Introduction - If you have any usage issues, please Google them yourself
The P S N R is most commonly used as a measure of quality of reconstruction of lossy compression codec (e.g., for image compression). The signal in this case is the original data, and the noise is the error introduced by compression. When comparing compression codecs it is used as an approximation to human perception of reconstruction quality, therefore in some cases one reconstruction may appear to be closer to the original than another, even though it has a lower PSNR (a higher PSNR would normally indicate that the reconstruction is of higher quality). One has to be extremely careful with the range of validity of this metric it is only conclusively valid when it is used to compare results from the same codec (or codec type) and same content.