Investigating Epipolar Plane Image Representations for Objective Quality Evaluation of Light Field Images

With the ongoing advances in Light Field(LF) technology, research in LF acquisition, compression, processing has gained momentum. This increased the need for objective quality evaluation of LF content. Many processing algorithms are still optimized against peak signal to noise ratio(PSNR). Lately, several attempts have been made to improve objective quality evaluation such as extending 2D metrics to 4D LF domain. However, there is still a great room for improvement. In this paper, we experiment with existing 2D image quality metrics on the Epipolar Plane Image representations of LF content to reveal characteristics of LF related distortions. We discuss the challenges and suggest possible directions towards a LF image quality evaluation on EPI representations.