3D video quality metric for 3D video compression

As the evolution of multiview display technology is bringing glasses-free 3DTV closer to reality, MPEG and VCEG are preparing an extension to HEVC to encode multiview video content. View synthesis in the current version of the 3D video codec is performed using PSNR as a quality metric measure. In this paper, we propose a full-reference Human-Visual-System based 3D video quality metric to be used in multiview encoding as an alternative to PSNR. Performance of our metric is tested in a 2-view case scenario. The quality of the compressed stereo pair, formed from a decoded view and a synthesized view, is evaluated at the encoder side. The performance is verified through a series of subjective tests and compared with that of PSNR, SSIM, MS-SSIM, VIFp, and VQM metrics. Experimental results showed that our 3D quality metric has the highest correlation with Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) compared to the other tested metrics.