No-reference quality assessment of DIBR-synthesized videos by measuring temporal flickering

Depth-image-based-rendering (DIBR) is the most popular view synthesis method. The rendering process in DIBR introduces artifacts to synthesized views. Temporal inconsistency of these artifacts causes flickering, which is one of the dominant distortions in DIBR-synthesized videos. We propose a no-reference quality index for DIBR-synthesized videos. A two-stage flickering region detection method is first proposed by calculating the gradient distance between the matching blocks in adjacent frames followed by a refinement operation. Subsequently, the distortion intensity of flickering regions is measured in singular value decomposition domain. The average flickering intensity is computed as the quality score. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts on the IRCCyN/IVC database and ranks the second on the SIAT database, which is only slightly worse than the best-performing one. Furthermore, the presented method is applied to improve the performances of existing metrics and benchmark DIBR algorithms, which achieves very promising results for both tasks.