Compiling SSIM on Mac

November 25th, 2014
tech
If you want to examine the distortion that comes from a lossy compression algorithm, it's helpful to have a tool that's a good proxy for asking a person "how similar are these two images"? The standard algorithm for this is SSIM, but there are several implementations. I was initially using Pornel's dssim, but I wanted to compare this to Mehdi's SSIM. Mehdi's doesn't document how to compile it on a mac, so here's what worked for me:

  1. Install OpenCV
    1. Download OpenCV for linux/mac. I downloaded 2.4.9 from opencv.org/downloads.
    2. unzip ~/Downloads/opencv-2.4.9.zip
    3. cd ~/Downloads/opencv-2.4.9/
    4. mkdir build && cd build
    5. cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" ..
    6. make -j8
    7. sudo make install
  2. Download SSIM.ccp: wget http://mehdi.rabah.free.fr/SSIM/SSIM.cpp
  3. The SSIM.cpp file needs a small change: replace "#include <iostream.h>" with "#include <iostream>".
  4. Compile with:
    g++ -I/usr/local/include/opencv \
        -L/usr/local/lib/ \
        -lopencv_core \
        -lopencv_highgui \
        -lopencv_imgproc \
        SSIM.cpp \
        -o ssim
  5. Enjoy using SSIM: ./ssim a-original.png a-modified.png

Comment via: substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Microfictions 2

A few more microfictions, still no LLMs.

via Evan Fields August 7, 2026

Linkpost for August

Announcement: for the next while, I’ll be writing the Effective Altruism Newsletter!

via Thing of Things August 6, 2026

Using AI to analyze life patterns

If you’re anything like me, you may have a lot of notes from various introspective activities – annual / monthly reviews, worksheets, therapy notes, etc. Often these notes are just gathering dust in a paper folder or some forgotten corner of Google Drive.…

via Victoria Krakovna July 30, 2026

more     (via openring)