No-Reference Quality Evaluation of Light Field Content Based on Structural Representation of The Epipolar Plane Image

Abstract

As an emerging technology, Light Field (LF) has gained ever-increasing importance in the domain. In order to provide guidance for the development of perceptually accurate Light Field (LF) processing tools and supervise the entire streaming system, robust perceptual quality assessment metrics are required. Especially, No-Reference (NR) metrics are preferable to compare LF with different angular resolutions. Some metrics have been developed by extending commonly used 2D image quality metrics to the 4D LF domain with angular consistency terms. Nonetheless, although these models consistently show slightly improved performance, most of them are limited in evaluating the quality of LF using the sub-aperture views with additional terms on the angular domain. There is an evident lack of reliable quality metrics that are tailored to LF content. To remedy this lack, we propose a NR quality metric for LF contents based on representing EPI with structural descriptors, including the Histogram of Gradients and the Convolutional Sparse Coding based descriptors. The primary motivation resides in our observations that (1) LF related distortions on the angular domain are highly noticeable on the Epipolar Plane Image representations (EPI); (2) most of the distortions in EPI are structure-related. Extensive experiments on the MPI-LFA [1] LF image quality dataset demonstrate that our method provides competitive performance with the state-of-the-art NR image quality metrics.