Subjective Assessment of H.264 Compressed Stereoscopic Video

The tremendous growth in 3D (stereo) imaging and display technologies has led to stereoscopic content (video and image) becoming increasingly popular. However, both the subjective and the objective evaluation of stereoscopic video content has not kept pace with the rapid growth of the content. Further, the availability of standard stereoscopic video databases is also quite limited. In this work, we attempt to alleviate these shortcomings. We present a stereoscopic video database and its subjective evaluation. We have created a database containing a set of 144 distorted videos. We limit our attention to H.264 compression artifacts. The distorted videos were generated using 6 uncompressed pristine videos of left and right views originally created by Goldmann et al. at EPFL [1]. Further, 19 subjects participated in the subjective assessment task. Based on the subjective study, we have formulated a relation between the 2D and stereoscopic subjective scores as a function of compression rate and depth range. We have also evaluated the performance of popular 2D and 3D image/video quality assessment (I/VQA) algorithms on our database.