Achieving high angular resolution via view synthesis: Quality assessment of 3D content on super multiview lightfield display

Super multiview (SMV) lightfield displays provide glasses- free immersive 3D experience via continuous motion parallax. Such displays require input views acquired at high angular resolution, which could be economically and technologically prohibitive. To achieve high view density, synthesizing absent views from the captured ones has recently been suggested. Clearly, a critical proportion of the views should be unsynthesized in order to ensure acceptable quality of the 3D content. In order to determine the said proportion we subjectively assessed the degradation in perceptual 3D quality vis-à- vis the proportion of synthesized views. The qualitative analysis of the subjective scores ascertained that the quality of 3D perception is mainly affected by discontinuities in motion parallax introduced by view synthesis, along with 2D quality of the constituent views. The subjective scores collected in the process exhibited a three-regime behaviour, corresponding to small, moderate and large proportion of synthesized views. For a high 3D quality experience, we recommend operation in the first regime, albeit its high sensitivity to the proportion of synthesized views. The second regime, less susceptible to the said proportion, can be considered when a moderate perceptual quality is acceptable. The third regime, exhibiting monotonous decrease in perceptual quality, is not recommended.