A wavelet-based image quality metric for the assessment of 3D synthesized views

In this paper we present a novel image quality assessment technique for evaluating virtual synthesized views in the context of multi-view video. In particular, Free Viewpoint Videos are generated from uncompressed color views and their compressed associated depth maps by means of the View Synthesis Reference Software, provided by MPEG. Prior to the synthesis step, the original depth maps are encoded with different coding algorithms thus leading to the creation of additional artifacts in the synthesized views. The core of proposed wavelet-based metric is in the registration procedure performed to align the synthesized view and the original one, and in the skin detection that has been applied considering that the same distortion is more annoying if visible on human subjects rather than on other parts of the scene. The effectiveness of the metric is evaluated by analyzing the correlation of the scores obtained with the proposed metric with Mean Opinion Scores collected by means of subjective tests. The achieved results are also compared against those of well known objective quality metrics. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed metric. © 2013 SPIE-IS&T.