Objective Quality Evaluation of an Angularly-Continuous Light-Field Format

Abstract

With the rapid advances in light-field display and camera technology, research in light-field content creation, visualization, coding and quality assessment has gained momentum. While light-field cameras are already available to the consumer, lightfield displays need to overcome several obstacles in order to become a commonplace. One of these challenges is the unavailability of a light-field visualization format which can be used across various light-field displays. Existing light-field representations are optimized for specific displays and converting them for visualization on a different display is a computationally expensive operation, often resulting in the degradation of perceptual quality. To this end, an intermediate, display-independent and angularly-continuous light-field representation format has been proposed recently, targeted towards large-field-of-view light-field displays. In this paper, we evaluate the said data format in terms of degradation in objective quality under three compression methods. We found that, while offering display-independence, the intermediate light-field format maintains the same objective quality in general and achieves higher objective quality in some cases compared to the conventional linear camera representation.

Datasets for the Quality Assessment of Light Field Imaging: Comparison and Future Directions

“…It is worth mentioning that quality metrics developed specifically for light fields exist (see e.g. [68], [69], [70], [71], [72]). Some of them, however, were developed and tested based on quality scores of subjects visualising content in commercial displays not designed for the visualisation of light fields.…”

The key performance indicators of projection-based light field visualization

“…An example of the compression of a light field acquired by multiple cameras is the work by Tamboli et al [23], where camera images were separately compressed using the JPEG, JPEG2000, and WebP compression methods. Similarly, the array of lenslet images captured using plenoptic cameras -considered a single image -was compressed using intra-coding methods [22,24].…”

Angularly continuous light‐field format: Concept, implementation, and evaluation

“…In a few cases—such as IFC scores for stimuli A and B—PC format achieved slightly higher objective values. The obtained data regarding these 2D quality metrics are analyzed in detail in an earlier publication …”

“…We carried out a series of subjective and objective tests to compare the visual performance of our own format with the conventional perspective camera format. The theoretical concept of the angularly continuous, display‐independent light‐field format, and the preliminary testing of the implementation were disseminated in earlier works . This work reports an extensive visual quality assessment, which used multiple subjective rating scales, source content, and test conditions (with varying angular resolution) to investigate the capabilities of our proposed format.…”