This paper proposes a novel no-reference Perception-based Image Quality Evaluator (PIQUE) for real-world imagery. A majority of the existing methods for blind image quality assessment rely on opinion-based supervised learning for quality score prediction. Unlike these methods, we propose an opinion unaware methodology that attempts to quantify distortion without the need for any training data. Our method relies on extracting local features for predicting quality. Additionally, to mimic human behavior, we estimate quality only from perceptually significant spatial regions. Further, the choice of our features enables us to generate a fine-grained block level distortion map. Our algorithm is competitive with the state-of-the-art based on evaluation over several popular datasets including LIVE IQA, TID & CSIQ. Finally, our algorithm has low computational complexity despite working at the block-level. © 2015 IEEE.