Different perceptual properties measured by SSIM and DISTS

Determine whether SSIM and DISTS measure different perceptual properties, as suggested by the degradation caused by combining their Hessian-derived maps.

Background

The paper evaluates Hessian-based distortion maps derived from several full-reference image quality assessment metrics, including SSIM and DISTS. In the reported rate-distortion results, combining or transferring maps associated with these metrics can degrade performance, suggesting that the two metrics may emphasize different aspects of perceptual quality rather than providing interchangeable signals.

The authors explicitly formulate this interpretation as a conjecture rather than establishing it theoretically or experimentally. Consequently, characterizing the distinct perceptual properties captured by SSIM and DISTS remains unresolved in the paper.

References

SSIM and DISTS maps degrade each other; we conjecture the two metrics measure different properties (\autoref{fig:maps}).

— Rate-distortion optimization for full-reference image quality metrics via stochastic Hessian estimates  (2609.30077 - Fernández-Menduiña et al., 24 Sep 2026) in Table 1 caption (Table \ref{tab:kodak}), Section 4, “Experiments”