Quality Evaluation of Color Plus Depth Map-Based Stereoscopic Video

In the near future, many conventional video applications are likely to be replaced by immersive video to provide a sense of “being there.” This transition is facilitated by the recent advancement of 3-D capture, coding, transmission, and display technologies. Stereoscopic video is the simplest form of 3-D video available in the literature. “Color plus depth map” based stereoscopic video has attracted significant attention, as it can reduce storage and bandwidth requirements for the transmission of stereoscopic content over communication channels. However, quality assessment of coded video sequences can currently only be performed reliably using expensive and inconvenient subjective tests. To enable researchers to optimize 3-D video systems in a timely fashion, it is essential that reliable objective measures are found. This paper investigates the correlation between subjective and objective evaluation of color plus depth video. The investigation is conducted for different compression ratios, and different video sequences. Transmission over Internet Protocol (IP) is also investigated. Subjective tests are performed to determine the image quality and depth perception of a range of differently coded video sequences, with packet loss rates ranging from 0% to 20%. The subjective results are used to determine more accurate objective quality assessment metrics for 3-D color plus depth video.