The work aims to propose an improved image quality evaluation algorithm based on Contourlet transform, in order to solve the inconsistency between subjective and objective evaluation results in the process of evaluating the printed image quality. The image was decomposed in a multi-scale and multi-directional manner in the Contourlet domain to obtain image features of different scales. The structural similarity (SSIM) was directly applied to each Contourlet decomposed sub-band and the SSIM of different frequency bands was obtained. The SSIM of a whole image was achieved on the basis of the weighted sum of SSIM from different frequency bands calculated, namely the final evaluation index of the image. The results of experiment study carried out based on the ISO standard test images showed that, the comprehensive evaluation effect of the described method was ideal and the consistency with the subjective evaluation was the best. The image quality evaluation method based on Contourlet transform domain structure similarity (CSSIM) can better evaluate the image quality and accord with human visual features. Therefore, it can be used for printed image processing.