Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 955

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 17 of the 17 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff

Open access
Blau, Yochai, Michaeli, Tomer·2018·2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

Image restoration algorithms are typically evaluated by some distortion measure (e.g. PSNR, SSIM, IFC, VIF) or by human opinion scores that quantify perceived perceptual quality. In this paper, we prove mathematically that distortion and perceptual quality are at odds with each other. Specifically, we study the optimal probability for correctly discriminating the outputs of an image restoration algorithm from real images. We show that as the mean distortion decreases, this probability must increase (indicating worse perceptual quality). As opposed to the common belief, this result holds true for any distortion measure, and is not only a problem of the PSNR or SSIM criteria. However, as we show experimentally, for some measures it is less severe (e.g. distance between VGG features). We also show that generative-adversarial-nets (GANs) provide a principled way to approach the perception-distortion bound. This constitutes theoretical support to their observed success in low-level vision tasks. Based on our analysis, we propose a new methodology for evaluating image restoration methods, and use it to perform an extensive comparison between recent super-resolution algorithms.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1109/cvpr.2018.00652

Cites

17 of 17 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 17 references

Cited by

See all 955

Metadata

Authors
Blau, Y., & Michaeli, T.
Venue
2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2018-06
Pages
6228-6237
ISSN
1063-6919 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2768814045
Cited by
955
References
17
FWCI
24.00
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/cvpr.2018.00652
The paper
Blau, Y., & Michaeli, T. (2018). The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff. 2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. https://doi.org/10.1109/cvpr.2018.00652

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.