# SAMScore: A Content Structural Similarity Metric for Image Translation Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15367 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15367/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [Albumentations: fast and flexible image augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06839/) (2018)
- [Toward Multimodal Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11586/) (2017)
- [BBDM: Image-to-image Translation with Brownian Bridge Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07680/) (2022)
- [Pros and Cons of GAN Evaluation Measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03446/) (2018)
- [EGSDE: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Energy-Guided Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06635/) (2022)
- [MedGAN: Medical Image Translation using GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06397/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation: Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08629/) (2021)
- [Unifying Diffusion Models' Latent Space, with Applications to CycleDiffusion and Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05559/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Multi-Modal Image Registration via Geometry Preserving Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08073/) (2020)
- [SynthRAD2023 Grand Challenge dataset: generating synthetic CT for radiotherapy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16320/) (2023)
- [Evaluation of Correctness in Unsupervised Many-to-Many Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15727/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Foundation Models for Biomedical Image Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07654/) (2024)
- [Video Quality Assessment: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04508/) (2024)
- [Diff-GO: Diffusion Goal-Oriented Communications to Achieve Ultra-High Spectrum Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02984/) (2023)
- [Zooming Out on Zooming In: Advancing Super-Resolution for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18082/) (2023)
- [Real-Time Cooked Food Image Synthesis and Visual Cooking Progress Monitoring on Edge Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16965/) (2025)
- [Vectra: A New Metric, Dataset, and Model for Visual Quality Assessment in E-Commerce In-Image Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07014/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 pixel-wise 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. The code is available at https://github.com/Kent0n-Li/SAMScore.