Subjective evaluation of Super Multi-View compressed contents on high-end light-field 3D displays

• Study of the impact of compression on subjective quality for lightfield SMV content.
• To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to report results of this kind.
• Several SMV coding configurations are compared both objectively and subjectively.
• Compression efficiency, depth estimation and view synthesis require improvements.
• SMV appears realistic according to next generation compression technology requirements.

Super Multi-View (SMV) video content is composed of tens or hundreds of views that provide a light-field representation of a scene. This representation allows a glass-free visualization and eliminates many causes of discomfort existing in current available 3D video technologies. Efficient video compression of SMV content is a key factor for enabling future 3D video services. This paper first compares several coding configurations for SMV content and several inter-view prediction structures are also tested and compared. The experiments mainly suggest that large differences in coding efficiency can be observed from one configuration to another. Several ratios for the number of coded and synthesized views are compared, both objectively and subjectively. It is reported that view synthesis significantly affects the coding scheme. The amount of views to skip highly depends on the sequence and on the quality of the associated depth maps. Reported ranges of bitrates required to obtain a good quality for the tested SMV content are realistic and coherent with future 4 K/8 K needs. The reliability of the PSNR metric for SMV content is also studied. Objective and subjective results show that PSNR is able to reflect increase or decrease in subjective quality even in the presence of synthesized views. However, depending on the ratio of coded and synthesized views, the order of magnitude of the effective quality variation is biased by PSNR. Results indicate that PSNR is less tolerant to view synthesis artifacts than human viewers. Finally, preliminary observations are initiated. First, the light-field conversion step does not seem to alter the objective results for compression. Secondly, the motion parallax does not seem to be impacted by specific compression artifacts. The perception of the motion parallax is only altered by variations of the typical compression artifacts along the viewing angle, in cases where the subjective image quality is already low. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to carry out subjective experiments and to report results of SMV compression for light-field 3D displays. It provides first results showing that improvement of compression efficiency is required, as well as depth estimation and view synthesis algorithms improvement, but that the use of SMV appears realistic according to next generation compression technology requirements.