# Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.07728 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/

## Key facts

- Cited by 811 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 811)

- [Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18259/) (2023)
- [DreamSim: Learning New Dimensions of Human Visual Similarity using Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09344/) (2023)
- [SeeSR: Towards Semantics-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16518/) (2023)
- [Generative Novel View Synthesis with 3D-Aware Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02602/) (2023)
- [DiffIR: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09472/) (2023)
- [Pixel-Aware Stable Diffusion for Realistic Image Super-resolution and Personalized Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14469/) (2023)
- [One-Step Effective Diffusion Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08177/) (2024)
- [TOPIQ: A Top-down Approach from Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03060/) (2023)
- [Lossy Image Compression with Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06950/) (2022)
- [No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Transformers, Relative Ranking, and Self-Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06858/) (2021)
- [Q-Instruct: Improving Low-level Visual Abilities for Multi-modality Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06783/) (2023)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Regress Accurate Image Quality Scores using Score Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11561/) (2025)
- [AEROBLADE: Training-Free Detection of Latent Diffusion Images Using Autoencoder Reconstruction Error](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17879/) (2024)
- [Dual Aggregation Transformer for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03364/) (2023)
- [latentSplat: Autoencoding Variational Gaussians for Fast Generalizable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16292/) (2024)
- [MVSplat360: Feed-Forward 360 Scene Synthesis from Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04924/) (2024)
- [Details or Artifacts: A Locally Discriminative Learning Approach to Realistic Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09195/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09388/) (2023)
- [Depicting Beyond Scores: Advancing Image Quality Assessment through Multi-modal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08962/) (2023)
- [Q-Insight: Understanding Image Quality via Visual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22679/) (2025)
- [On Interaction Between Augmentations and Corruptions in Natural Corruption Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11273/) (2021)
- [Pixel-level and Semantic-level Adjustable Super-resolution: A Dual-LoRA Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03017/) (2024)
- [Image Quality Assessment using Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13266/) (2021)
- [Improving Statistical Fidelity for Neural Image Compression with Implicit Local Likelihood Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11189/) (2023)
- [ARNIQA: Learning Distortion Manifold for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14918/) (2023)
- [TSD-SR: One-Step Diffusion with Target Score Distillation for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18263/) (2024)
- [Degradation-Guided One-Step Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17058/) (2024)
- [CoSeR: Bridging Image and Language for Cognitive Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16512/) (2023)
- [DreamClear: High-Capacity Real-World Image Restoration with Privacy-Safe Dataset Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18666/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Radiance Fields for Single-Image Portrait View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02310/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Objective measures of image quality generally operate by comparing pixels of a "degraded" image to those of the original. Relative to human observers, these measures are overly sensitive to resampling of texture regions (e.g., replacing one patch of grass with another). Here, we develop the first full-reference image quality model with explicit tolerance to texture resampling. Using a convolutional neural network, we construct an injective and differentiable function that transforms images to multi-scale overcomplete representations. We demonstrate empirically that the spatial averages of the feature maps in this representation capture texture appearance, in that they provide a set of sufficient statistical constraints to synthesize a wide variety of texture patterns. We then describe an image quality method that combines correlations of these spatial averages ("texture similarity") with correlations of the feature maps ("structure similarity"). The parameters of the proposed measure are jointly optimized to match human ratings of image quality, while minimizing the reported distances between subimages cropped from the same texture images. Experiments show that the optimized method explains human perceptual scores, both on conventional image quality databases, as well as on texture databases. The measure also offers competitive performance on related tasks such as texture classification and retrieval. Finally, we show that our method is relatively insensitive to geometric transformations (e.g., translation and dilation), without use of any specialized training or data augmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/dingkeyan93/DISTS.