Rarity Score : A New Metric to Evaluate the Uncommonness of Synthesized Images

Evaluation metrics in image synthesis play a key role to measure performances of generative models. However, most metrics mainly focus on image fidelity. Existing diversity metrics are derived by comparing distributions, and thus they cannot quantify the diversity or rarity degree of each generated image. In this work, we propose a new evaluation metric, called `rarity score', to measure both image-wise uncommonness and model-wise diversified generation performance. We first show empirical observation that typical samples are close to each other and distinctive samples are far from each other in nearest-neighbor distances on latent spaces represented by feature extractor networks such as VGG16. We then show that one can effectively filter typical or distinctive samples with the proposed metric. We also use our metric to demonstrate that the extent to which different generative models produce rare images can be effectively compared. Further, our metric can be used to compare rarities between datasets that share the same concept such as CelebA-HQ and FFHQ. Finally, we analyze the use of metrics in different designs of feature extractors to better understand the relationship between feature spaces and resulting high-rarity images. Code will be publicly available for the research community.