The perceived quality of light-field video services

Real-time video transmission services are unquestionably dominating the flow of data over the Internet, and their percentage of the global IP packet traffic is still continuously increasing. As novel visualization technologies are emerging, they tend to demand higher bandwidth requirements; they offer more visually, but in order to do so, they need more data to be transmitted. The research and development of the past decades in optical engineering enabled light-field displays to surface and appear in the industry and on the market, and light-field video services are already on the horizon. However, the data volumes of high-quality light-field contents can be immense, creating storing, coding and transmission challenges. If we consider the representation of light-field content as a series of 2D views, then for a single video frame, angular resolution determines the number of views within the field of view, and spatial resolution defines the 2D size of those views. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment carried out to investigate the perceptual differences between different angular and spatial resolution parametrization of a light-field video service. The study highlights how the two resolution values affect each other regarding perceived quality, and how the combined effects are detected, perceived and experienced by human observers. By achieving an understanding of the related visual phenomena, especially degradations that are unique for light-field visualization, the design and development of resource-efficient light-field video services and applications become more straightforward.