Quality assessment of stereoscopic 360-degree images from multi-viewports

Objective quality assessment of stereoscopic panoramic images becomes a challenging problem owing to the rapid growth of 360-degree contents. Different from traditional 2D image quality assessment (IQA), more complex aspects are involved in 3D omnidirectional IQA, especially unlimited field of view (FoV) and extra depth perception, which brings difficulty to evaluate the quality of experience (QoE) of 3D omnidirectional images. In this paper, we propose a multi-viewport based full-reference stereo 360 IQA model. Due to the freely changeable viewports when browsing in the head-mounted display, our proposed approach processes the image inside FoV rather than the projected one such as equirectangular projection (ERP). In addition, since overall QoE depends on both image quality and depth perception, we utilize the features estimated by the difference map between left and right views which can reflect disparity. The depth perception features along with binocular image qualities are employed to further predict the overall QoE of 3D 360 images. The experimental results on our public Stereoscopic OmnidirectionaL Image quality assessment Database (SOLID) show that the proposed method achieves a significant improvement over some well-known IQA metrics and can accurately reflect the overall QoE of perceived images