PCQM: A Full-Reference Quality Metric for Colored 3D Point Clouds

3D point clouds constitute an emerging multimedia content, now used in a wide range of applications. The main drawback of this representation is the size of the data since typical point clouds may contain millions of points, usually associated with both geometry and color information. Consequently, a significant amount of work has been devoted to the efficient compression of this representation. Lossy compression leads to a degradation of the data and thus impacts the visual quality of the displayed content. In that context, predicting perceived visual quality computationally is essential for the optimization and evaluation of compression algorithms. In this paper, we introduce PCQM, a full-reference objective metric for visual quality assessment of 3D point clouds. The metric is an optimally-weighted linear combination of geometry-based and color-based features. We evaluate its performance on an open subjective dataset of colored point clouds compressed by several algorithms; the proposed quality assessment approach outperforms all previous metrics in terms of correlation with mean opinion scores.