SSIM

Alright, I'm implementing SSIM. There are like 30 different implementations on the web, and most either rely on huge dependencies like OpenCV or have crappy licenses. So which one do I compare mine too? The situation with SSIM seems worse than PSNR. There are just so many variations on how to compute this thing.

I'm choosing this implementation for comparison purposes, because I already have the fundamental image processing primitives handy:

http://mehdi.rabah.free.fr/SSIM/SSIM.cpp

On Multi-Scale SSIM: I've been given conflicting information on whether or not this is actually useful to me. Let's first try regular SSIM.

For testing, I compared my implementation, using my own float image processing code, vs. the code above that uses doubles and OpenCV. To generate some distorted test images, I loaded kodim18 into Paint Shop Pro X8 and saved to various JPEG quality levels from 1-99. I then ran the two tools and graphed the results in Excel:

The X axis represents the various quality levels, from highest to lowest quality. The 12 PSP JPEG quality levels tested are 1, 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 99. Y axis is SSIM.

Thanks to John Brooks at Blue Shift for feedback on this post.