Comparison of Boundary Artifact Removal Methods in Coding of Generalized Cubemap Projection Using VVC

Virtual reality applications use 360-degree videos and head mount displays with stereoscopic capabilities to provide full immersion experience. Among existing projection format, Cubemap projection provides and improved compression performance, but similar to other projects, it suffers from visual artifacts in the rendered viewport because of discontinuity of the content in different regions. In this work, we investigated the effect of different methods in Versatile Video Coding standard and other pre- and post-processing algorithms for removing boundary artifacts by introducing a new objective quality metric for systematic comparison. We further improve the current methods by aligning the GCMP’s face boundaries to coding unit boundaries. The observation is that the combination of these method with existing methods in VVC offers the best result.