On the role of distance transformations in Baddeley’s Delta Metric

Abstract Comparison and similarity measurement have been a key topic in computer vision for a long time. There is, indeed, an extensive list of algorithms and measures for image or subimage comparison. The superiority or inferiority of different measures is hard to scrutinize, especially considering the dimensionality of their parameter space and their many different configurations. In this work, we focus on the comparison of binary images, and study different variations of Baddeley’s Delta Metric, a popular metric for such images. We study the possible parameterizations of the metric, stressing the numerical and behavioural impact of different settings. Specifically, we consider the parameter settings proposed by the original author, as well as the substitution of distance transformations by regularized distance transformations, as recently presented by Brunet and Sills. We take a qualitative perspective on the effects of the settings, and also perform quantitative experiments on separability of datasets for boundary evaluation.