Bridging the Perception Gap in Image Super-Resolution Evaluation

As super-resolution (SR) techniques advance, we observe a growing distrust of evaluation metrics in recent SR research. An inconsistency often emerges between certain evaluation criteria and human perceptual preference. Although current SR research employs varying metrics to evaluate SR performance, it remains underexplored how robust and reliable these metrics actually are. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of widely used image quality metrics, examining their consistency with human perception when evaluating state-of-the-art SR models. We show that some metrics exhibit only limited—or even negative—correlation with human preferences. We further identify several intrinsic challenges in SR evaluation that compromise the effectiveness of both full-reference (FR) and no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) frameworks. To address these issues, we propose a simple yet effective Relative Quality Index (RQI) framework, which assesses the relative quality discrepancy between image pairs. Our framework enables easy integration and notable improvements for existing IQA metrics in SR evaluation. Moreover, it can be utilized as a valuable training guide for SR models, enabling the generation of images with more realistic details while maintaining structural fidelity.