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Shannon's entropy for an image

Submitted by: @import:stackexchange-cs··
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Problem

Shannon's entropy [plog(1/p)] for an image is a probabilistic method for comparing two pixels or a group of pixels.Suppose an image with a matrix of 3x3 has pixel intensity values

1 1 2
2 3 3
4 4 5


and another image with 3x3 matrix has group of pixels having intensity values

5 5 6
6 7 7
8 8 9


Then shannon's entropy for the images would be the same.So in this case the entropy values would point out that the images are same though in actual they are different.So image matching using this technique doesn't help.On basis of supervised classification where I classify an image based on trained databases of shannon's entropy ,we use the concept of entropy to find similarity between two images.Is there any method or research paper where this entropy can be used or modified for image matching for the above case..?

Solution

Shannon's entropy works as a hashing or fingerprinting function here; they are not injective which means we have to be careful not to interpret too much into relations of values.

If $H(I_1) \neq H(I_2)$, then images $I_1$ and $I_2$ are certainly not the same.

If $H(I_1) = H(I_2)$ (or even $H(I_1) \approx H(I_2)$), however, we know nothing. The images might be similar, but the values can also be close because of non-injectivity.

We would like to have some smoothness, that is that two images are more different if $|H(I_1) - H(I_2)|$ is larger. Whether this is the case is certainly a quality criterion of such fingerprinting functions. Given your example, it does not seem as if entropy was a good fingerprint in this sense.

It would be confusing if any kind of entropy would be. Any rectangle of one color holds no information (entropy zero), yet two rectangles of different colors are as different as two images get.

Context

StackExchange Computer Science Q#4935, answer score: 5

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