Fuelled by the increase in popularity of virtual and augmented reality applications, point clouds have emerged as a popular 3D format for acquisition and rendering of digital humans, thanks to their versatility and real-time capabilities. Due to technological constraints and real-time rendering limitations, however, the visual quality of dynamic point cloud contents is seldom evaluated using virtual and augmented reality devices, instead relying on prerecorded videos displayed on conventional 2D screens. In this study, we evaluate how the visual quality of point clouds representing digital humans is affected by compression distortions. In particular, we compare three different viewing conditions based on the degrees of freedom that are granted to the viewer: passive viewing (2DTV), head rotation (3DoF), and rotation and translation (6DoF), to understand how interacting in the virtual space affects the perception of quality. We provide both quantitative and qualitative results of our evaluation involving 78 participants, and we make the data publicly available. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study evaluating the quality of dynamic point clouds in virtual reality, and comparing it to traditional viewing settings. Results highlight the dependency of visual quality on the content under test, and limitations in the way current data sets are used to evaluate compression solutions. Moreover, influencing factors in quality evaluation in VR, and shortcomings in how point cloud encoding solutions handle visually-lossless compression, are discussed.
翻译:在虚拟和增强现实应用的普及程度的推动下,由于技术限制和实时影响限制,动态点云内容的视觉质量很少使用虚拟和增强的现实设备进行评估,而是依靠常规的2D屏幕上显示的预先录制的视频。在这项研究中,我们评估代表数字人的点云的视觉质量如何受到压缩扭曲的影响。特别是,我们比较了三种基于授予观众的自由程度的不同观察条件:被动查看(2DTV)、头旋转(3DoF)和轮换和翻译(6DF),以了解虚拟空间的互动如何影响质量感。我们提供我们78名参与者参与的定量和定性评价结果,我们公布数据。我们最了解的是,这是对虚拟现实中动态点云的质量进行的第一次研究,并将它与传统观察环境进行比较。结果突出了在测试中的内容对视觉质量的依赖性,在对当前数据组合中,压轴质量评估是如何使用的。