Objective quality evaluation of an angularly-continuous light-field format

With the rapid advances in light-field display and camera technology, research in light-field content creation, visualization, coding and quality assessment has gained momentum. While light-field cameras are already available to the consumer, light-field displays need to overcome several obstacles in order to become a commonplace. One of these challenges is the unavailability of a light-field visualization format which can be used across various light-field displays. Existing light-field representations are optimized for specific displays and converting them for visualization on a different display is a computationally expensive operation, often resulting in the degradation of perceptual quality. To this end, an intermediate, display-independent and angularly-continuous light-field representation format has been proposed recently, targeted towards large-field-of-view light-field displays. In this paper, we evaluate the said data format in terms of degradation in objective quality under three compression methods. We found that, while offering display-independence, the intermediate light-field format maintains the same objective quality in general and achieves higher objective quality in some cases compared to the conventional linear camera representation

Light-field capture and display systems : limitations, challenges, and potentials

The recent advances in light-The recent advances in light-field acquisition and display systems bring closer the day when they become commercially available and accessible to wide audiences for numerous use cases. Their usefulness and potential benefits have already been disseminated in the field and they started emerging in both industry and entertainment applications. The long-term goal of the scientific community and future manufacturers is to research and develop fully immersive, yet seamless and efficient systems that can achieve the ultimate visual experience. However, certain paths leading to such goals are blocked by technological and physical limitations, and also significant challenges that have to be coped with. Although some issues that rise regarding the development of capture and display systems may actually be nearly impossible to overcome, the potential for light-field applications is indeed immense, thus worth the vast scientific effort. In this paper, we systematically analyze and present the current and future relevant limitations and challenges regarding the research and development of light-field systems. As current limitations are primarily application-specific, both challenges and potentials are approached from the angle of end-user applications. The paper separately highlights the use case scenarios for industry and entertainment, and for everyday commercial usage. Currently existing light-field systems are assessed and introduced from a technical perspective and also with regards to usability, and potential future systems are described based on state-of-art technologies and research focuses. Aspects of practical usage, such as scalability and price, are thoroughly detailed for both light-field capture and visualization

The viewing conditions of light-field video for subjective quality assessment

At the time of this paper, research on the quality of light-field visualization is continuously gaining momentum, as the excellence in visual performance shall be one of the key enablers of the emergence and long-Term presence of this technology on the consumer market. Experiments on perceived quality began in parallel with the appearance of commercially available light-field displays. As the techniques of subjective quality assessment on these displays are not standardized yet, certain parameters may greatly vary, such as viewing conditions. Although most of the current research efforts in this area address forms of static visualization, light-field video is also an essential target of quality evaluation. In this paper, we introduce the results of an experiment investigating the viewing conditions of light-field video quality assessment. The tests directly compare the perceived horizontal motion parallax of static viewing positions with motion patterns. The visual quality of the test conditions was degraded by the reduction of content spatial and angular resolution, as they both affect the smoothness of the horizontal motion parallax

The key performance indicators of projection-based light field visualization

At the time of writing this paper, light field visualization has entered the professional environments in the industry and has also become commercially available. It is not yet present on the consumer market, however, and its widespread emergence is expected in the following decade, with affordable end user devices and a vast variety of applications and contents. The successful integration of this technology into people’s everyday lives essentially depends on the visualization quality, which is achieved through excellence in terms of the key performance indicators of the display system and the content it visualizes. In this paper, the key performance indicators of light field visualization for both display and content are reviewed. Beyond providing a comprehensive review of the vital parameters of visualization quality, this paper discusses the ongoing and future relevant research efforts, demonstrates the practical uses of the technology, highlights certain dependencies between the indicators, and addresses issues of perceived quality with regard to the lack of compliance with the requirements and visual thresholds