The invention provides a color image quality evaluation method based on joint entropy, and belongs to the technical field of digital image quality objective evaluation, machine vision and artificial intelligence. The joint entropy in statistics is used for measuring the quality difference between a distorted image and a standard image, the image quality evaluation method based on the special jointentropy is provided, and the problem of quality distortion degradation brought to a digital image when the image is transmitted, stored, compressed, edited and the like is solved. The obtained imagedistortion evaluation data can objectively describe and evaluate the distortion degradation degree of the image, and is consistent with human eye perception characteristics. According to the evaluation method, objective evaluation can be carried out on distorted images such as noise, blurring, JPEG compression and JPEG2000 compression, especially low-degree distorted images; an evaluation result conforms to human eye perception, and the method has good evaluation performance, can be used in the fields of image fusion, image analysis, intelligent detection and the like, and has good applicationpotential and value.