Objective and subjective quality assessment of geometry compression of reconstructed 3D humans in a 3D virtual room

Abstract

Compression of 3D object based video is relevant for 3D Immersive applications. Nevertheless, the perceptual aspects of the degradation introduced by codecs for meshes and point clouds are not well understood. In this paper we evaluate the subjective and objective degradations introduced by such codecs in a state of art 3D immersive virtual room. In the 3D immersive virtual room, users are captured with multiple cameras, and their surfaces are reconstructed as photorealistic colored/textured 3D meshes or point clouds. To test the perceptual effect of compression and transmission, we render degraded versions with different frame rates in different contexts (near/far) in the scene. A quantitative subjective study with 16 users shows that negligible distortion of decoded surfaces compared to the original reconstructions can be achieved in the 3D virtual room. In addition, a qualitative task based analysis in a full prototype field trial shows increased presence, emotion, user and state recognition of the reconstructed 3D Human representation compared to animated computer avatars.

Evaluating the user Experience of a Photorealistic Social VR Movie

“…Wei et al [55] proposed a bidirectional system that can animate photorealistic avatar heads based on both users' full likenesses using consumer-friendly HMD mounted cameras. However, subjective assessments of user experience have shown that CG avatars offer lower presence and state recognition as compared to 3D user reconstructions [32,33].…”

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

“…While relevant to our work, their study is focused on clean point clouds and the evaluation is performed on a flat screen. In [20], an objective and subjective evaluation of different compression algorithms applied on reconstructed 3D human meshes in a virtual environment is presented. This work, while in the same application area with ours, is focusing on compression of immersive 3D-media without investigating compression artifacts on clean models.…”

“…This work, while in the same application area with ours, is focusing on compression of immersive 3D-media without investigating compression artifacts on clean models. Furthermore, the real-time 3D reconstruction method used to produce the human 3D meshes in [20] is one of the first in the field, while in the current paper we use 3D meshes produced by a more recent and higher quality method [6]. Additionally, while the meshes used in [20] are textured, we choose to exclude texturing from our meshes in an effort to eliminate the unwanted effects of texturing on the subjects' choices, as texture masking can greatly reduce the perception of geometric distortions and degradations [11].…”

“…Additionally, while the meshes used in [20] are textured, we choose to exclude texturing from our meshes in an effort to eliminate the unwanted effects of texturing on the subjects' choices, as texture masking can greatly reduce the perception of geometric distortions and degradations [11]. Finally, in the present work we consider more recent and open-sourced 3D mesh codecs than [20].…”

A pipeline for multiparty volumetric video conferencing

“…This allows a more natural representation of participants in teleimmersive conferencing applications. Mekuria et al [6] conducted a subjective study to compare the user experience of photorealistic reconstruction of users and synthetic avatars in a teleimmersive environment. The authors found that reconstructions increase the presence as well as physical, emotional and user state recognition compared to synthetic avatars.…”