google/butteraugli

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases archived

Adoption not part of the score

2001 stars · 141 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Butteraugli is a C++ library and command-line tool that estimates the psychovisual difference between two images, producing both a scalar score and a spatial heatmap of differences. It is designed to be reliable for barely noticeable differences, making it useful as a quality metric for lossy image and video compression.

Use cases

• measure perceived difference between two images
• compare quality of two image compression methods
• tune jpeg quality settings based on perceptual similarity
• generate a heatmap of visual differences between images
• evaluate lossy image or video compression quality
• compare png and jpg images psychovisually

When to choose

• you need a perceptual image quality metric tuned for barely noticeable differences
• you are building or evaluating lossy image/video codecs
• you want a scalar score plus a spatial difference map
• you need a C++ library you can integrate into a compression pipeline

When to avoid

• you need to compare images with major deformations rather than subtle differences
• you need bindings for languages other than C++
• you want a maintained tool with frequent releases
• you need a simple all-purpose image diff without psychovisual modeling

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

image-processing benchmarking developer-tools image-processing graphics performance cpp cross-platform cli psychovisual-metric image-quality perceptual-diff compression-quality heatmap

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="google/butteraugli")