SAMScore: A Content Structural Similarity Metric for Image Translation Evaluation

Abstract

Image translation has wide applications, such as style transfer and modality conversion, usually aiming to generate images having both high degrees of realism and faithfulness. These problems remain difficult, especially when it is important to preserve content structures. Traditional image-level similarity metrics are of limited use, since the content structures of an image are high-level and not strongly governed by pixelwise faithfulness to an original image. To fill this gap, we introduce SAMScore, a generic content structural similarity metric for evaluating the faithfulness of image translation models. SAMScore is based on the recent high-performance segment anything model (SAM), which allows content similarity comparisons with standout accuracy. We applied SAMScore on 19 image translation tasks and found that it is able to outperform all other competitive metrics on all tasks. We envision that SAMScore will prove to be a valuable tool that will help to drive the vibrant field of image translation, by allowing for more precise evaluations of new and evolving translation models.