A survey on visual quality assessment methods for light fields

Abstract

Unlike traditional cameras, Light Field (LF) cameras are able to capture both the intensity and direction of light rays from the scene. This rich information demands a certain amount of memory and bandwidth for storage and transmission, and to alleviate this requirement, LF content is processed and compressed. These operations often add degradations to the LF content that can affect its visual quality, requiring the use of methods that can measure visual quality as perceived by the end consumer. For this reason, the area of visual quality of immersive media has been gaining a lot of attention. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art visual quality assessment methods for LF contents. First, we discuss the LF quality datasets that have been introduced, which contain subjective quality scores. Second, we discuss subjective quality assessment methods followed by objective quality assessment methods. Then we present a statistical comparison of a set of objective visual quality assessment methods. Finally, we summarize this survey and present future research demands for LF contents.