An efficient human visual system based quality metric for 3D video

Abstract

Stereoscopic video technologies have been introduced to the consumer market in the past few years. A key factor in designing a 3D system is to understand how different visual cues and distortions affect the perceptual quality of stereoscopic video. The ultimate way to assess 3D video quality is through subjective tests. However, subjective evaluation is time consuming, expensive, and in some cases not possible. The other solution is developing objective quality metrics, which attempt to model the Human Visual System (HVS) in order to assess perceptual quality. Although several 2D quality metrics have been proposed for still images and videos, in the case of 3D efforts are only at the initial stages. In this paper, we propose a new full-reference quality metric for 3D content. Our method mimics HVS by fusing information of both the left and right views to construct the cyclopean view, as well as taking to account the sensitivity of HVS to contrast and the disparity of the views. In addition, a temporal pooling strategy is utilized to address the effect of temporal variations of the quality in the video. Performance evaluations showed that our 3D quality metric quantifies quality degradation caused by several representative types of distortions very accurately, with Pearson correlation coefficient of 90.8 %, a competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art 3D quality metrics.