  The morphology of the stagnated plasma resulting from Magnetized Liner
Inertial Fusion (MagLIF) is measured by imaging the self-emission x-rays coming
from the multi-keV plasma. Equivalent diagnostic response can be generated by
integrated radiation-magnetohydrodynamic (rad-MHD) simulations from programs
such as HYDRA and GORGON. There have been only limited quantitative ways to
compare the image morphology, that is the texture, of simulations and
experiments. We have developed a metric of image morphology based on the Mallat
Scattering Transformation (MST), a transformation that has proved to be
effective at distinguishing textures, sounds, and written characters. This
metric is designed, demonstrated, and refined by classifying ensembles (i.e.,
classes) of synthetic stagnation images, and by regressing an ensemble of
synthetic stagnation images to the morphology (i.e., model) parameters used to
generate the synthetic images. We use this metric to quantitatively compare
simulations to experimental images, experimental images to each other, and to
estimate the morphological parameters of the experimental images with
uncertainty. This coordinate space has proved very adept at doing a
sophisticated relative background subtraction in the MST space. This was needed
to compare the experimental self emission images to the rad-MHD simulation
images.
