Hybrid Sequencing of Uncompressed and Compressed 3D Stereoscopic Video: A Preliminary Quality Evaluation

The use of 3D stereoscopic technology with high quality videos can provide visual entertainment to viewers. However, the bandwidth of typical communication channels cannot transmit uncompressed 3D videos, resulting in the need for video quality compression. This paper presents a series of preliminary studies to investigate the subjective perception of uncompressed and compressed video sequences, and proposes the ‘hybrid’ sequencing of uncompressed and compressed content in a single stereoscopic 3D video as an alternative approach for limited bandwidth transmission. However, the hybrid uncompressed/compressed sequencing of stereoscopic 3D video may affect the correlation between the left and right views of the stereoscopic videos required for depth perception, potentially leading to lower Quality of Experience (QoE) of viewers. This paper therefore investigates both the objective and subjective quality evaluation of the proposed hybrid sequencing of stereoscopic video sequences. Initial investigations into objective metrics to measure the difference in quality of the two stereoscopic views due to the proposed hybrid sequencing of uncompressed and compressed videos were also conducted

Stereoscopic video quality assessment using binocular energy

Stereoscopic imaging is becoming increasingly popular. However, to ensure the best quality of experience, there is a need to develop more robust and accurate objective metrics for stereoscopic content quality assessment. Existing stereoscopic image and video metrics are either extensions of conventional 2D metrics (with added depth or disparity information) or are based on relatively simple perceptual models. Consequently, they tend to lack the accuracy and robustness required for stereoscopic content quality assessment. This paper introduces full-reference stereoscopic image and video quality metrics based on a Human Visual System (HVS) model incorporating important physiological findings on binocular vision. The proposed approach is based on the following three contributions. First, it introduces a novel HVS model extending previous models to include the phenomena of binocular suppression and recurrent excitation. Second, an image quality metric based on the novel HVS model is proposed. Finally, an optimised temporal pooling strategy is introduced to extend the metric to the video domain. Both image and video quality metrics are obtained via a training procedure to establish a relationship between subjective scores and objective measures of the HVS model. The metrics are evaluated using publicly available stereoscopic image/video databases as well as a new stereoscopic video database. An extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the robustness of the proposed quality metrics. This indicates a considerable improvement with respect to the state-of-the-art with average correlations with subjective scores of 0.86 for the proposed stereoscopic image metric and 0.89 and 0.91 for the proposed stereoscopic video metrics