Abstract
Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications have seen a drastic increase in commercial popularity. Different representations have been used to create 3D reconstructions for AR and VR. Point clouds are one such representation characterized by their simplicity and versatility, making them suitable for real time applications, such as reconstructing humans for social virtual reality. In this study, we evaluate how the visual quality of digital humans, represented using point clouds, is affected by compression distortions. We compare the performance of the upcoming point cloud compression standard against an octree-based anchor codec. Two different VR viewing conditions enabling 3- and 6 degrees of freedom are tested, to understand how interacting in the virtual space affects the perception of quality. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work performing user quality evaluation of dynamic point clouds in VR; in addition, contributions of the paper include quantitative data and empirical findings. Results highlight how perceived visual quality is affected by the tested content, and how current data sets might not be sufficient to comprehensively evaluate compression solutions. Moreover, shortcomings in how point cloud encoding solutions handle visually-lossless compression are discussed.
Highlights
Recent advances in capturing, media processing, and 3D rendering technologies make Virtual Reality (VR)/Augmented Reality (AR) applications popular for mass consumption [34]
In the context of point cloud compression, such scarcity of available data may lead to compression solutions being designed, optimized and tested while considering a considerably narrow range of input data, leading to algorithms that are overfitted to the specifics of the acquisition method used to obtain the contents
We compare the performance of the point cloud compression standard V-PCC against an octree-based anchor codec (MPEG anchor)
Summary
Media processing, and 3D rendering technologies make VR/AR applications popular for mass consumption [34]. In this new media landscape, point clouds are becoming commonplace due to their simplicity and versatility. This paper provides an exhaustive quality comparison between different encoding configurations of digital humans, represented as point clouds. By investigating the differences in quality, we provide insights about how to optimise the delivery for both downloading and real-time communication. One key novelty of this paper is to study the quality based on realistic consumption conditions, in 3- and 6- Degrees of Freedom (DoF) scenarios
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