A new reduced reference metric for color plus depth 3D video

•We propose a reduced reference quality metric for 3D videos.•This metric employs structural and statistical measures of 3D videos.•This metric is broadly validated in presence of compression or transmission artifacts.•This metric can be employed in estimating QoE of compressed or transmitted 3D videos.

A new reduced reference (RR) objective quality metric for 3D video is proposed that incorporates spatial neighboring information. The contrast measures from gray level co-occurrence matrices (GLCM) for both color and depth sections are main parts of spatial information. Side information is extracted from edge properties of reference 3D video and sent through an auxiliary channel. The other important factor in the proposed metric is the unequal weight of color and depth sections, which can maximize the performance of the proposed metric for some specific values. Performance of the proposed metric is validated through series of subjective tests. For validations, compression and transmission artifacts are considered. The average correlation of the proposed metric and subjective quality scores is 0.82 for compressed 3D videos when color to depth importance ratio is near 0.8. This measure for transmitted 3D videos is 0.857 for the same value of color to depth importance ratio.