Image quality assessment (IQA) is useful in many visual processing systems but challenging to perform in line with the human perception. A great deal of recent research effort has been directed towards IQA. In order to overcome the difficulty and infeasibility of subjective tests in many situations, the aim of such effort is to assess visual quality objectively towards better alignment with the perception of the Human Visual system (HVS). In this work, we review and analyze the recent progress in the areas related to IQA, as well as giving our views whenever possible. Following the recent trends, we discuss the engineering approach in more details, explore the related aspects for feature pooling, and present a case study with machine learning. © 2010 SPIE.