An image fidelity assessment using the edge histogram descriptor (EHD) of MPEG-7 is presented. Neither additional data nor fragile watermarking is needed, and there is no need to access the original image as a reference. Only the EHDs of the original image and the received image are required. The peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) obtained by comparing the EHD extracted from the received image and that of the original image is used to assess the noise level of the received image. Experimental results show that the PSNRs calculated from the conventional pixel-to-pixel gray level and from the proposed bin-to-bin EHD maintain a proportional relationship. This implies that the EHD can be used instead of image data for the image fidelity assessments.