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Image quality assessment (IQA) techniques are applied to paired synthetic and real-world image subsets to quantify visual similarity and identify feature-level limitations that correlate with transfer performance. Among the evaluated metrics, the Structural Similarity (SSIM) index and Complex Wavelet SSIM (CW-SSIM) index showed consistent trends, where higher IQA scores corresponded to improved sim2real detection accuracy\u2013most notably with increases of approximately 0.10 (SSIM) and 0.15 (CW-SSIM). These metrics effectively captured contrast, structure, and luminance similarities, offering a practical proxy for assessing digital twin fidelity. To support reproducibility and broader use, we introduce the Synthetic Image Quality Analysis Calculator (SIQAC), an open-source tool for automated IQA evaluation and sim2real potential prediction across classifiers and object detectors. Additional experiments demonstrated that the IQA-based approach generalizes to real2sim scenarios using zero-shot object detectors. This work bridges concepts from the human visual system and compression analysis to provide a lightweight, interpretable method for early-stage validation of virtual autonomy pipelines.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1007\/s11760-025-04406-y","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,6,26]],"date-time":"2025-06-26T10:36:59Z","timestamp":1750934219000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Predicting Transfer Performance Using Foreground Image Quality in Synthetic Vision Systems"],"prefix":"10.1007","volume":"19","author":[{"given":"Michael A.","family":"Mardikes","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"John T.","family":"Evans","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Nathan C.","family":"Sprague","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Gregory M.","family":"Shaver","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,6,26]]},"reference":[{"key":"4406_CR1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Dimitropoulos, K., Hatzilygeroudis, I. & Chatzilygeroudis, K. 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