Local SVD-Entropy Maps as a Complementary Structural Representation for Full-Reference and No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

arXiv:2609.27959v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate a local spectral-complexity representation for perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) based on Shannon entropy of singular values computed directly from two-dimensional image patches. For each $3\times3$-pixel grayscale patch, SVD is applied directly and the normalized singular-value entropy defines one HSVD-map value. The construction requires neither flattening nor delay embedding, uses no boundary padding, and is invariant to $90^{\circ}$ rotations and mirror reflections at the local-descriptor level. A nested salt-and-pepper experiment on Lena separates absolute similarity to a clean reference from sensitivity to an additional degradation step. HSVD-SSIM responds more strongly to local corruption and retains a larger neighboring-state response at severe noise levels. Validation on all 10,125 distorted KADID-10k images shows that HSVD-SSIM is weaker than conventional SSIM as a standalone full-reference metric (SRCC $0.450$ vs. $0.619$), but complementary when combined with it: grouped cross-validation increases SRCC from $0.618$ to $0.659$, with a bootstrap 95\% confidence interval of $[0.036,0.046]$ for the gain. In a no-reference experiment, adding HSVD-derived single-image descriptors improves the best nonlinear model from SRCC $0.528$ to $0.575$ (95\% CI $[0.033,0.061]$) and also improves prediction of quality changes between neighboring distortion states. These results support direct local SVD entropy as an interpretable structural channel that complements conventional image-domain similarity and remains informative without a pristine reference.