Structural similarity metrics for texture analysis and retrieval

The development of objective texture similarity metrics for image analysis applications differs from that of traditional image quality metrics because substantial point-by-point deviations are possible for textures that according to human judgment are essentially identical. Thus, structural similarity metrics (SSIM) attempt to incorporate ¿structural¿ information in image comparisons. The recently proposed structural texture similarity metric (STSIM) relies entirely on local image statistics. We extend this idea further by including a broader set of local image statistics, basing the selection on metric performance as compared to subjective evaluations. We utilize both intra- and inter-subband correlations, and also incorporate information about the color composition of the textures into the similarity metrics. The performance of the proposed metrics is compared to PSNR, SSIM, and STSIM on the basis of subjective evaluations using a carefully selected set of 50 texture pairs.