A Domain-specific Perceptual Metric via Contrastive Self-supervised Representation: Applications on Natural and Medical Images

Quantifying the perceptual similarity of two images is a long-standing problem in low-level computer vision. The natural image domain commonly relies on supervised learning, e.g., a pre-trained VGG, to obtain a latent representation. However, due to domain shift, pre-trained models from the natural image domain might not apply to other image domains, such as medical imaging. Notably, in medical imaging, evaluating the perceptual similarity is exclusively performed by specialists trained extensively in diverse medical fields. Thus, medical imaging remains devoid of task-specific, objective perceptual measures. This work answers the question: Is it necessary to rely on supervised learning to obtain an effective representation that could measure perceptual similarity, or is self-supervision sufficient? To understand whether recent contrastive self-supervised representation (CSR) may come to the rescue, we start with natural images and systematically evaluate CSR as a metric across numerous contemporary architectures and tasks and compare them with existing methods. We find that in the natural image domain, CSR behaves on par with the supervised one on several perceptual tests as a metric, and in the medical domain, CSR better quantifies perceptual similarity concerning the experts' ratings. We also demonstrate that CSR can significantly improve image quality in two image synthesis tasks. Finally, our extensive results suggest that perceptuality is an emergent property of CSR, which can be adapted to many image domains without requiring annotations.