A robust similarity measure for automatic inspection

We introduce a new similarity measure that is insensitive to sub-pixel misregistration. The proposed measure is essential in some differences detection scenarios. For example, in a setting where a digital reference is compared to an image, where the imaging process introduces deformations that appear as non constant misregistration between the two images. Our goal is to ignore image differences that result from misregistration and detect only the true, albeit minute, defects. In order to define a misregistration insensitive similarity, we argue that a similarity measure must respect convex combinations. We show that the well known SSIM [1] does not hold this property and propose a modified version of SSIM that respects convex combinations. We then use this measure to define Sub-Pixel misregistration aware SSIM (SPSSIM).