Local SVD-Entropy Maps as a Complementary Structural Representation for Full-Reference and No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

We investigate a local spectral-complexity representation for perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) based on Shannon entropy of singular values computed directly from two-dimensional image patches. For each 3×3-pixel grayscale patch, SVD is applied directly and the normalized singular-value entropy defines one HSVD-map value. The construction requires neither flattening nor delay embedding, uses no boundary padding, and is invariant to 90circ rotations and mirror reflections at the local-descriptor level. A nested salt-and-pepper experiment on Lena separates absolute similarity to a clean reference from sensitivity to an additional degradation step. HSVD-SSIM responds more strongly to local corruption and retains a larger neighboring-state response at severe noise levels. Validation on all 10,125 distorted KADID-10k images shows that HSVD-SSIM is weaker than conventional SSIM as a standalone full-reference metric (SRCC 0.450 vs. 0.619), but complementary when combined with it: grouped cross-validation increases SRCC from 0.618 to 0.659, with a bootstrap 95% confidence interval of [0.036,0.046] for the gain. In a no-reference experiment, adding HSVD-derived single-image descriptors improves the best nonlinear model from SRCC 0.528 to 0.575 (95% CI [0.033,0.061]) and also improves prediction of quality changes between neighboring distortion states. These results support direct local SVD entropy as an interpretable structural channel that complements conventional image-domain similarity and remains informative without a pristine reference.