Point Cloud Quality Assessment

Background

A large and dense collection of points in three-dimensional space, collected by sensors such as LiDAR, is known as a point cloud. Points in the point cloud consist of geometric properties, such as three-dimensional spatial coordinates (x, y, z), and other attributes like color, reflectance, opacity, etc., represented by feature vectors. Since point clouds can directly represent the 3D world, they are widely employed in various fields, such as photogrammetry, power monitoring, architectural surveying, digital manufacturing, autonomous driving, gaming, cultural heritage reservation, and more.

Significance

Interactive point clouds typically contain millions of colored points and may possess complex attributes. To address the substantial transmission bandwidth and storage space required by point clouds, esearchers have developed various point cloud compression (PCC) techniques. However, point cloud compression may introduce significant visual distortions. In addition, deformations and distortions frequently occur during the acquisition, processing, transmission, rendering, and interaction of point clouds, all of which degrade the visual quality of the point cloud, ultimately impacting the application’s user experience. Therefore, effective methods for quantifying the quality of compressed point clouds are needed. More generally, point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) is crucial for optimizing and evaluating point cloud processing algorithms, such as encoding, denoising, and super-resolution.