Contour-Based Depth Coding: A Subjective Quality Assessment Study

Multi-view video plus depth is emerging as the most flexible format for 3D video representation, as witnessed by the current standardization efforts by ISO and ITU. The depth information allows synthesizing virtual view points, and for its compression various techniques have been proposed. It is generally recognized that a high quality view rendering at the receiver side is possible only by preserving the contour information since distortions on edges during the encoding step would cause a sensible degradation on the synthesized view and on the 3D perception. As a consequence recent approaches include contour-based coding of depths. However, the impact of contour-preserving depth-coding on the perceived quality of synthesized images has not been conveniently studied. Therefore in this paper we make an investigation by means of a subjective study to better understand the limits and the potentialities of the different techniques. Our results show that the contour information is indeed relevant in the synthesis step: preserving the contours and coding coarsely the rest typically leads to images that users cannot tell apart from the reference ones, even at low bit rate. Moreover, our results show that objective metrics that are commonly used to evaluate synthesized images may have a low correlation coefficient with MOS rates and are in general not consistent across several techniques and contents.