Subjective Evaluation of Dynamic Point Clouds: Impact of Compression and Exploration Behavior

The objective of this work was to explore the subjective quality assessment of dynamic point clouds with compression artifacts and to analyze the exploration behavior of the users while visualizing them with a Head-Mounted Display with 6 Degrees-of-Freedom. Thus, this paper presents a subjective study on dynamic point clouds using the Absolute Category Rating methodology and considering different compression rates using the MPEG standard Video-based Point Cloud Compression. Firstly, results on the impact of compression artifacts on the perceived Quality of Experience of the users are reported, showing the validity of Absolute Category Rating, although more than 20 observers may be needed to obtain robust conclusions. Results on users' exploration behavior show no significant differences when visualizing point clouds with different qualities, no changes in the behavior during the test session, and no correlation between exploration activity and quality assessments. Further research will be conducted to help identify appropriate methodologies for the subjective assessment of point clouds and for understanding users' exploration behavior.