Subjective and objective quality evaluation of compressed point clouds

Abstract

The increasing availability of point cloud data in recent years is demanding high performance compression solutions. Naturally, methods to perform objective quality assessment of compressed point clouds are also very much needed, namely metrics to measure the geometry distortion of point clouds when positioning errors are present. This is a rather challenging problem since this 3D representation format is unstructured and it is typically not directly visualized. In this context, the objective of this paper is to perform subjective and objective quality assessment of point clouds degraded by compression artifacts and to evaluate the correlation of the most popular objective quality metrics with human perception. In this work, subjective experiments conducted at Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST) are described with point clouds compressed with two different but yet promising solutions, one based on the octree representation of the 3D space and another based on the rather popular graph transform. As far as the authors know, this is the first study of this type made available and should have a key role on the future development and evaluation of point cloud coding solutions.1