Reduced Reference Perceptual Quality Model with Application to Rate Control for Video-Based Point Cloud Compression

In rate-distortion optimization, the encoder settings are determined by maximizing a reconstruction quality measure subject to a constraint on the bitrate. One of the main challenges of this approach is to define a quality measure that can be computed with low computational cost and which correlates well with the perceptual quality. While several quality measures that fulfil these two criteria have been developed for images and videos, no such one exists for point clouds. We address this limitation for the video-based point cloud compression (V-PCC) standard by proposing a linear perceptual quality model whose variables are the V-PCC geometry and color quantization step sizes and whose coefficients can easily be computed from two features extracted from the original point cloud. Subjective quality tests with 400 compressed point clouds show that the proposed model correlates well with the mean opinion score, outperforming state-of-the-art full reference objective measures in terms of Spearman rank-order and Pearson linear correlation coefficient. Moreover, we show that for the same target bitrate, rate-distortion optimization based on the proposed model offers higher perceptual quality than rate-distortion optimization based on exhaustive search with a point-to-point objective quality metric. Our datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/qdushl/Waterloo-Point-Cloud-Database-2.0.