Quality Evaluation Of Static Point Clouds Encoded Using MPEG Codecs

This paper presents a quality evaluation study of point cloud codecs that have been recently standardised by the MPEG committee. In particular, a subjective experiment to assess their performance in terms of bitrate against visual quality is designed and realized in four independent laboratories. The experimental setup of each laboratory varies; yet, the obtained subjective scores exhibit high inter laboratory correlation, confirming that the adopted assessment protocol is robust to equipment selection and viewing conditions, ensuring reliability and facilitating repeatability. Our study confirms the superior compression performance of the MPEG V-PCC, when compared to MPEG G-PCC, in the case of static contents. Finally, results from a benchmark of the most popular objective quality metrics using the obtained subjective scores as ground truth, reveal that the point2plane with mean square error is the most accurate quality predictor, closely followed by the point2point also using mean square error as distance measure.