A study on the relationship between depth map quality and the overall 3D video quality of experience

The emergence of multiview displays has made the need for synthesizing virtual views more pronounced, since it is not practical to capture all of the possible views when filming multiview content. View synthesis is performed using the available views and depth maps. There is a correlation between the quality of the synthesized views and the quality of depth maps. In this paper we study the effect of depth map quality on perceptual quality of synthesized view through subjective and objective analysis. Our evaluation results show that: 1) 3D video quality depends highly on the depth map quality and 2) the Visual Information Fidelity index computed between the reference and distorted depth maps has Pearson correlation ratio of 0.75 and Spearman rank order correlation coefficient of 0.67 with the subjective 3D video quality.