ERank in Latent Space as an Image-Complexity and Richness Measure

Abstract

We propose the effective rank (ERank) of the channel covariance of an image's deep feature map as a per-sample, label-free measure of visual richness, computed from a single forward pass through a frozen pretrained encoder. ERank counts how many decorrelated channel directions an image activates, and we characterize its properties, including its behavior under noise. Empirically, ERank orders images from plain to visually rich, correlates with codec bitrate, sharpness, and edge density, and correlates with human complexity annotations on IC9600 with $r = 0.72$. As a data-selection criterion, removing low-ERank samples improves super-resolution and removing high-ERank samples improves OCR, in both pretraining and finetuning, while selection does not help classification, segmentation, or denoising. ERank is thus a cheap richness signal, useful exactly when task difficulty is governed by input richness.