DQP-PCQA: Deep Quantization Parameters Bring New Insight to Point Cloud Quality Assessment

With the rapid development of immersive multimedia technology, the growing demand for high-quality visual experiences has driven the emergence of point cloud quality assessment (PCQA). While current deep learning-based PCQA models have achieved breakthroughs in performance, problems such as high computational complexity and limited model generalization ability still need to be solved. In this study, focusing on compression distortion, we analyzed and verified that the compression quantization parameter (QP) can be used as a key feature for predicting perceptual quality. Based on this, a novel no-reference point cloud perceptual quality assessment metric, DQP-PCQA, is proposed. Unlike existing PCQA models that only use mean opinion score (MOS) as a supervisory label, this study proposes a multi-objective constrained optimization scheme that adds geometric quantization parameter (GQP) and texture quantization parameter (TQP) as auxiliary supervisory labels to help the model can learn robust perceptual features that take into account both subjective quality and objective distortion. We conducted comparative experiments with other advanced PCQA models on several mainstream PCQA datasets. The results show that the DQP-PCQA model achieves fast convergence speed, excellent and stable performance, low complexity and strong generalization. Further migration experiments show that after applying our proposed method to other advanced PCQA models, the performance of the improved model is further improved. Our discovery provides new insight for PCQA research. To facilitate future reproducible research, the source code will be publicly released at https://github.com/Dds46/DQP-PCQA.