Virtual reality : quality and compression

Virtual Reality (VR) and its applications have attracted significant and increasing attention. However, the requirements of much larger file sizes, different storage formats, and immersive viewing conditions pose significant challenges to the goals of acquiring, transmitting, compressing and displaying high quality VR content. Towards meeting these challenges, it is important to be able to understand the distortions that arise and that can affect the perceived quality of displayed VR content. It is also important to develop ways to automatically predict VR picture quality. Meeting these challenges requires basic tools in the form of large, representative subjective VR quality databases on which VR quality models can be developed and which can be used to benchmark VR quality prediction algorithms. Towards making progress in this direction, here we present the results of an immersive 3D subjective image quality assessment study. In the study, 450 distorted images obtained from 15 pristine 3D VR images modified by 6 types of distortion of varying severities were evaluated by 42 subjects in a controlled VR setting. Both the subject ratings as well as eye-tracking data were recorded and made available as part of the new database, in hopes that the relationships between gaze direction and perceived quality might be better understood. We evaluated several publicly available IQA models on the new database, and also report a statistical evaluation of the performances of the compared IQA models. Another challenge present in VR is rendering 360 videos within the limited bandwidth. Video has become an increasingly important part of our daily digital communication. With the development of higher resolution contents and displays, its significant volume poses significant challenges to the goals of acquiring, transmitting, compressing and displaying high quality video content. In this direction, we propose a new deep learning video compression architecture that does not require motion estimation, which is the most expensive element of modern hybrid video compression codecs like H.264 and HEVC. Our framework exploits the regularities inherent to video motion, which we capture by using displaced frame differences as video representations to train the neural network. In addition, we propose a new space-time reconstruction network based on both an LSTM model and an UNet model, which we call LSTM-UNet. The combined network is able to efficiently capture both temporal and spatial video information, making it highly amenable for our purposes. Our experimental results show that our compression model, which we call the MOtionless VIdeo Codec (MOVI-Codec), learns how to efficiently compress videos without computing motion. Our experiments show that MOVI-Codec outperforms the Low-Delay P (LDP) veryfast setting of the video coding standard H.264 and exceeds the performance of the modern global standard HEVC codec, using the same setting, as measured by MS-SSIM, especially on higher resolution videos. In addition, our network outperforms the latest H.266 (VVC) codec at higher bitrates, when assessed using MS-SSIM, on high resolution videos. Because of the high bandwidth requirements of VR, there has also been significant interest in the use of space-variant, foveated compression protocols. We have further integrated these techniques to create another end-to-end deep learning video compression framework in addition to MOVI-Codec. Foveation protocols are desirable since, unlike traditional flat-panel displays, only a small portion of a video viewed in VR may be visible as a user gazes in any given direction. Moreover, even within a current field of view (FOV), the resolution of retinal neurons rapidly decreases with distance (eccentricity) from the projected point of gaze. In our learning based approach, we implement foveation by introducing a Foveation Generator Unit (FGU) that generates foveation masks which direct the allocation of bits, significantly increasing compression efficiency while making it possible to retain an impression of little to no additional visual loss given an appropriate viewing geometry. Our experiment results reveal that our new compression model, which we call the Foveated MOtionless VIdeo Codec (Foveated MOVI-Codec), is able to efficiently compress videos without computing motion, while outperforming foveated version of both H.264 and H.265 on the widely used UVG dataset and on the HEVC Standard Class B Test Sequences.