Hi,
I have dealt with this extensively as we test flash applications which perform dynamic anti-aliasing/smoothing. Image comparisons can be very flakey across flash as well as different browsers!
Yes if you set the image tolerance to e.g. 20 that means that it allows for a variance of 20 in each of the components i.e. R, G and B.
You do have access to the individual pixels to process them on your own and create your own image comparison functions. I would think in script that this would be slow though but it is possible. So you can go:
pictureObject.Pixels(2,5) and get the RGB value at that pixel and perform the comparison yourself.
Of course with small images this would be ok but with hundreds of thousands of pixels (e.g. 1024x768 image is 786,432 pxiels) I'm not sure how fast it would be.
You could also create your own plugin in .NET and then perhaps pass your images to that for processing. Maybe that would be faster?
But that's all I could think of at the moment :) Sorry I couldn't be of more help!
Cheers
Mark