A local intensity adaptive structural similarity index

Existing structural similarity (SSIM) index comprises of one term on luminance comparison and the other term on contrast and structure comparison. In this paper, the SSIM index is first improved by introducing three weighting factors to the second term such that it is adaptive to local intensities of two images to be compared. The improved SSIM (iSSIM) index is further extended for two images with possibly different exposures. Experimental results show that the proposed indices are more robust to large intensity changes of two images from the same scene and more sensitive to two images from different scenes than the existing SSIM index.