The pixels disagree. The structure does not.
The useful result is not a master similarity score. It is the pattern of agreement and refusal across layers.
01 / Substrate · NCD
—
Literal byte-field distance. Low means the compressor finds shared material.
02 / Tone
—
Distance between luminance distributions after normalization.
03 / Form
—
Distance between spatial fingerprints: placement, void, packing, spread, pull.
04 / Center refusal
—
How strongly mass avoids frame-center agreement across the pair.
Shared material / shared formNear-image family. Both literal and structural witnesses agree.
Different material / shared formThe important quadrant: pixels diverge while composition persists.
Shared material / changed formEdit, crop, displacement, or rearrangement has altered spatial organization.
Different material / different formNeither literal structure nor compositional structure is conserved.