New challenges in point cloud visual quality assessment: a systematic review

Abstract

The compression, transmission and rendering of point clouds is essential for many use cases, notably immersive experience settings in eXtended Reality, telepresence and real-time communication where real world acquired 3D content is displayed in a virtual or real scene. Processing and display for these applications induce visual artifacts and the viewing conditions can impact the visual perception and Quality of Experience of users. Therefore, point cloud codecs, rendering methods, display settings and more need to be evaluated through visual Point Cloud Quality Assessment (PCQA) studies, both subjective and objective. However, the standardization of recommendations and methods to run such studies did not follow the evolution of the research field and new issues and challenges have emerged. In this paper, we make a systematic review of subjective and objective PCQA studies. We collected scientific papers from online libraries (IEEE Xplore, ACM DL, Scopus) and selected a set of relevant papers to analyze. From our observations, we discuss the progress and future challenges in PCQA toward efficient point cloud video coding and rendering for eXtended Reality. Main axes for development include the study of use case specific influential factors and the definition of new test conditions for subjective PCQA, and development of perceptual learning-based methods for objective PCQA metrics as well as more versatile evaluation of their performance and time complexity.