Another look at SSIM image quality metric

Abstract

We review the design of the SSIM quality metric and offer an alternative model of SSIM computation, utilizing subband decomposition and identical distance measures in each subband. We show that this model performs very close to the original and offers many advantages from a methodological standpoint. It immediately brings several possible explanations of why SSIM is effective. It also suggests a simple strategy for band noise allocation optimizing SSIM scores. This strategy may aid the design of encoders or pre-processing filters for video coding. Finally, this model leads to more straightforward mathematical connections between SSIM, MSE, and SNR metrics, improving previously known results. Keywords—Image quality, PSNR, SSIM, SNR