Subjective Visual Quality Assessment of Immersive 3D Media Compressed by Open-Source Static 3D Mesh Codecs

EasyChair Preprint no. 561

Abstract

While studies for objective and subjective evaluation of the visual quality of compressed 3D meshes has been discussed in the literature, those studies were covering the evaluation of 3D-meshes that were created either by 3D artists or generated by a computationally expensive 3D reconstruction process applied on high quality 3D scans. With the advent of RGB-D sensors that operate at high frame-rates and the utilization of fast 3D reconstruction algorithms, humans can be captured and 3D reconstructed into a 3D mesh representation in real-time, enabling new (tele-)immersive experiences. The way of producing the respective 3D mesh content is dramatically different between the two cases, leading to apparent structural difference between the output meshes. On one hand, the first type of content is nearly perfect and clean, while on the other hand, the second type is much more irregular and noisy. Thus, evaluating compression artifacts on this new type of immersive 3D media, constitutes a yet unexplored scientific area. In this paper, we aim to subjectively assess the compression artifacts introduced by three open-source static 3D mesh codecs, when compressing 3D meshes generated for immersive experiences. The subjective evaluation of the content is conducted in a Virtual Reality setting, using the forced-choice pairwise comparison methodology with existing reference. The results of this study is a mapping of the compared conditions to a continuous ranking scale that can be used in order to optimize codec choice and compression parameters to achieve optimum balance between bandwidth and perceived quality in tele-immersive platforms.

Keyphrases: 3D, Compression, Forced Pairwise Comparison, Subjective visual quality study, Tele-immersion, Virtual Reality (VR)

@Booklet{EasyChair:561,
  author = {Kyriaki Christaki and Emmanouil Christakis and Petros Drakoulis and Alexandros Doumanoglou and Nikolaos Zioulis and Dimitrios Zarpalas and Petros Daras},
  title = {Subjective Visual Quality Assessment of Immersive 3D Media Compressed by Open-Source Static 3D Mesh Codecs},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 561},
  doi = {10.29007/ms1v},
  year = {EasyChair, 2018}}