A Study on Image Comparison Metrics for Atmospheric Scattering Phenomenon Rendering

Though reference image quality can be calculated with several, well established, comparison methods, images synthesizing light atmospheric scattering phenomenon require adequate evaluation approaches. Current metrics concentrate mainly on noise ratio, entropy or simple pixels correlation coefficients. Thus methods require images strict adequacy in structure and position of their components. On the other hand, light atmospheric scattering renders, synthesized with different methods, should concentrate on their structural representation and possible color gradients rather than direct correspondence of individual pixels. The paper presents a study on image comparison methods in a context of light atmospheric scattering phenomenon. We have focused on several, most popular image comparison metrics like Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC), Structural Similarity (SSIM), Multi-Scale Structural Similarity (MS-SSIM) and Perceptual Difference (PD). We compare this metrics in terms of clear sky synthesis problem and try to select the most relevant metrics for the stated phenomenon. The conclusion and discussion provides a handful of suggestions concerning phenomenon related metrics selection.