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Specificity

The Specificity of a generative appearance model measures the extent to which images generated by the model are similar to those in the training set. A specific model should generate a distribution of images that overlaps the training distribution as completely as possible. If we take a synthetic image set such as that defined previously, $\{I_{\alpha}:\alpha=1,\ldots m\}$, each synthetic image should be close to an image in the training set. We define the Specificity, $S$, and its standard error, $\sigma_{S}$, as follows:


\begin{displaymath}
S=\frac{1}{m}
\sum\limits_{\alpha=1}^{m}{\bf min}_{i}\vert I_{i}-I_{\alpha}\vert,
\end{displaymath} (5)


\begin{displaymath}
\mathbf{\sigma_{S}}=\frac{SD({\bf min}_{i}\vert I_{i}-I_{\alpha}\vert)}{\sqrt{m-1}}.\end{displaymath} (6)

That is, Specificity is the average distance from each synthetic image to the nearest training image. A good model exhibits a low value of Specificity, indicating that it generates synthetic images, all of which are similar to those in the training set.



Roy Schestowitz 2007-03-11