Global-Local Image Perceptual Score (GLIPS): Evaluating Photorealistic Quality of AI-Generated Images

Abstract

This article introduces the global-local image perceptual score (GLIPS), an image metric designed to assess the photorealistic image quality of AI-generated images with a high degree of alignment to human visual perception. Traditional metrics such as Fréchet inception distance (FID) and kernel inception distance scores do not align closely with human evaluations. The proposed metric incorporates advanced transformer-based attention mechanisms to assess local similarity and maximum mean discrepancy to evaluate global distributional similarity. To evaluate the performance of GLIPS, we conducted a human study on photorealistic image quality. Comprehensive tests across various generative models demonstrate that GLIPS consistently outperforms existing metrics like FID, structural similarity index measure, and multiscale structural similarity index measure in terms of correlation with human scores. In addition, we introduce the interpolative binning scale, a refined scaling method that enhances the interpretability of metric scores by aligning them more closely with human evaluative standards. The proposed metric and scaling approach not only provide more reliable assessments of AI-generated images but also suggest pathways for future enhancements in image generation technologies.