João Ascenso

Pedro Martin, António Rodrigues, João Ascenso et al.

Gaussian Splatting (GS) has emerged as an efficient representation for high-quality 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis. However, its large model size poses challenges for storage and transmission. While several GS compression solutions have been proposed, their perceptual impact remains poorly understood due to the lack of dedicated evaluation datasets. To address this gap, this paper introduces GScomp-QA, a subjective quality assessment dataset for evaluating synthesis quality from compressed GS models. The dataset comprises 331 video stimuli from 13 real-world scenes, covering 9 state-of-the-art GS compression solutions. By using videos synthesized from uncompressed models as reference, GScomp-QA isolates compression-induced distortions from synthesis artifacts. A subjective study with 20 participants was conducted, providing reliable perceptual scores. Based on these data, GS compression solutions are evaluated through perceptual rate-distortion analysis. In addition, 18 objective quality metrics are evaluated, showing that they do not fully capture GS-specific distortions. GScomp-QA will be publicly available and provide a benchmark for evaluating GS compression solutions and supporting the development of quality metrics tailored to GS compression.

Mohsen Jenadeleh, Jon Sneyers, Davi Lazzarotto et al.

High dynamic range (HDR) and wide color gamut (WCG) technologies significantly improve color reproduction compared to standard dynamic range (SDR) and standard color gamuts, resulting in more accurate, richer, and more immersive images. However, HDR increases data demands, posing challenges for bandwidth efficiency and compression techniques. Advances in compression and display technologies require more precise image quality assessment, particularly in the high-fidelity range where perceptual differences are subtle. To address this gap, we introduce AIC-HDR2025, the first such HDR dataset, comprising 100 test images generated from five HDR sources, each compressed using four codecs at five compression levels. It covers the high-fidelity range, from visible distortions to compression levels below the visually lossless threshold. A subjective study was conducted using the JPEG AIC-3 test methodology, combining plain and boosted triplet comparisons. In total, 34,560 ratings were collected from 151 participants across four fully controlled labs. The results confirm that AIC-3 enables precise HDR quality estimation, with 95\% confidence intervals averaging a width of 0.27 at 1 JND. In addition, several recently proposed objective metrics were evaluated based on their correlation with subjective ratings. The dataset is publicly available.

Pedro Martin, António Rodrigues, João Ascenso et al.

Gaussian Splatting (GS) offers a promising alternative to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) for real-time 3D scene rendering. Using a set of 3D Gaussians to represent complex geometry and appearance, GS achieves faster rendering times and reduced memory consumption compared to the neural network approach used in NeRF. However, quality assessment of GS-generated static content is not yet explored in-depth. This paper describes a subjective quality assessment study that aims to evaluate synthesized videos obtained with several static GS state-of-the-art methods. The methods were applied to diverse visual scenes, covering both 360-degree and forward-facing (FF) camera trajectories. Moreover, the performance of 18 objective quality metrics was analyzed using the scores resulting from the subjective study, providing insights into their strengths, limitations, and alignment with human perception. All videos and scores are made available providing a comprehensive database that can be used as benchmark on GS view synthesis and objective quality metrics.

Semih Esenlik, Yaojun Wu, Zhaobin Zhang et al.

JPEG AI is an emerging learning-based image coding standard developed by Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG). The scope of the JPEG AI is the creation of a practical learning-based image coding standard offering a single-stream, compact compressed domain representation, targeting both human visualization and machine consumption. Scheduled for completion in early 2025, the first version of JPEG AI focuses on human vision tasks, demonstrating significant BD-rate reductions compared to existing standards, in terms of MS-SSIM, FSIM, VIF, VMAF, PSNR-HVS, IW-SSIM and NLPD quality metrics. Designed to ensure broad interoperability, JPEG AI incorporates various design features to support deployment across diverse devices and applications. This paper provides an overview of the technical features and characteristics of the JPEG AI standard.

Pedro Martin, António Rodrigues, João Ascenso et al.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have revolutionized the field of 3D visual representation by enabling highly realistic and detailed scene reconstructions from a sparse set of images. NeRF uses a volumetric functional representation that maps 3D points to their corresponding colors and opacities, allowing for photorealistic view synthesis from arbitrary viewpoints. Despite its advancements, the efficient streaming of NeRF content remains a significant challenge due to the large amount of data involved. This paper investigates the rate-distortion performance of two NeRF streaming strategies: pixel-based and neural network (NN) parameter-based streaming. While in the former, images are coded and then transmitted throughout the network, in the latter, the respective NeRF model parameters are coded and transmitted instead. This work also highlights the trade-offs in complexity and performance, demonstrating that the NN parameter-based strategy generally offers superior efficiency, making it suitable for one-to-many streaming scenarios.

Alireza Javaheri, Catarina Brites, Fernando Pereira et al.

Point cloud coding solutions have been recently standardized to address the needs of multiple application scenarios. The design and assessment of point cloud coding methods require reliable objective quality metrics to evaluate the level of degradation introduced by compression or any other type of processing. Several point cloud objective quality metrics has been recently proposed to reliable estimate human perceived quality, including the so-called projection-based metrics. In this context, this paper proposes a joint geometry and color projection-based point cloud objective quality metric which solves the critical weakness of this type of quality metrics, i.e., the misalignment between the reference and degraded projected images. Moreover, the proposed point cloud quality metric exploits the best performing 2D quality metrics in the literature to assess the quality of the projected images. The experimental results show that the proposed projection-based quality metric offers the best subjective-objective correlation performance in comparison with other metrics in the literature. The Pearson correlation gains regarding D1-PSNR and D2-PSNR metrics are 17% and 14.2 when data with all coding degradations is considered.

Alireza Javaheri, Catarina Brites, Fernando Pereira et al.

Point clouds (PCs) are a powerful 3D visual representation paradigm for many emerging application domains, especially virtual and augmented reality, and autonomous vehicles. However, the large amount of PC data required for highly immersive and realistic experiences requires the availability of efficient, lossy PC coding solutions are critical. Recently, two MPEG PC coding standards have been developed to address the relevant application requirements and further developments are expected in the future. In this context, the assessment of PC quality, notably for decoded PCs, is critical and asks for the design of efficient objective PC quality metrics. In this paper, a novel point-to-distribution metric is proposed for PC quality assessment considering both the geometry and texture. This new quality metric exploits the scale-invariance property of the Mahalanobis distance to assess first the geometry and color point-to-distribution distortions, which are after fused to obtain a joint geometry and color quality metric. The proposed quality metric significantly outperforms the best PC quality assessment metrics in the literature.

Alireza Javaheri, Catarina Brites, Fernando Pereira et al.

An increased interest in immersive applications has drawn attention to emerging 3D imaging representation formats, notably light fields and point clouds (PCs). Nowadays, PCs are one of the most popular 3D media formats, due to recent developments in PC acquisition, namely with new depth sensors and signal processing algorithms. To obtain high fidelity 3D representations of visual scenes a huge amount of PC data is typically acquired, which demands efficient compression solutions. As in 2D media formats, the final perceived PC quality plays an important role in the overall user experience and, thus, objective metrics capable to measure the PC quality in a reliable way are essential. In this context, this paper proposes and evaluates a set of objective quality metrics for the geometry component of PC data, which plays a very important role in the final perceived quality. Based on the popular PSNR PC geometry quality metric, the novel improved PSNR-based metrics are proposed by exploiting the intrinsic PC characteristics and the rendering process that must occur before visualization. The experimental results show the superiority of the best-proposed metrics over the state-of-the-art, obtaining an improvement of up to 32% in the Pearson correlation coefficient.