Depth perceptual quality assessment for symmetrically and asymmetrically distorted stereoscopic 3D videos

Abstract Depth perception is one of the most important features provided by stereoscopic 3D videos, which is also the major difference to 2D videos. Its quality, called depth perceptual quality or depth quality, is one of the key factors that directly affects the quality of experience of 3D videos. Since 3D video shall be compressed, transmitted and reconstructed in 3D video system, distortion introduced from compression and processing affects the video quality as well as the depth perceptual quality. However, understandings of how the distortions affect the depth perception and how to evaluate the depth perceptual quality of 3D video remain limited. In this paper, subjective experiments are firstly conducted for investigating the compression and processing distortions’ impacts on the perceived depth quality of 3D videos. The subjective experiments over the datasets show that the loss of video details can cause the degradation of the depth perceptual quality in monocular and binocular perspectives. In addition, the relationships between video quality and depth quality for both symmetric and asymmetric distorted 3D stereoscopic videos are analyzed. Both the subjective video quality and depth quality scores are released and available for public. Secondly, an objective depth quality assessment algorithm is proposed for measuring the depth perceptual quality degradation of symmetrically and asymmetrically distorted stereoscopic 3D videos. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed metric has better consistency with the subjective scores of human vision system compared with the state-of-the-art schemes.