In the context of image compression, the term "estimate" most likely refers to estimating the error introduced by the compression/decompression process.
A fairly common measure of image reconstruction quality is "Peak Signal to Noise Ratio" or (PSNR).
Wikipedia gives a reasonable explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_signal-to-noise_ratio[
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If you need more help than the Wikipedia description, try Googling "PSNR" or "PSNR estimation"