Point cloud quality assessment: unifying projection, geometry, and texture similarity.

Methods for (PC) quality assessment customarily perform local comparisons between corresponding points in the "degraded" and pristine PCs. These methods often compare the geometry of the degraded PC and the geometry of the reference PC. More recently, a few methods that use texture information to assess the PC quality have been proposed. In this work, we propose a full-reference Point Cloud Quality Assessment (PCQA) metric that combines both geometry and texture information to provide an estimate of the PC quality. We use a projection technique that represents PCs as 2D manifolds in the 3D space. This technique maps attributes from the PCs onto the folded 2D grid, generating a pure-texture 2D image (texture maps) that contains PC texture information. Then, we extract statistical features from these texture maps using a multi-scale rotation-invariant texture descriptor named the Dominant Rotated Local Binary Pattern (DRLBP). The texture similarity is computed by measuring the statistical differences between reference and test PCs. The geometrical similarities are computed using geometry-only distances. Finally, the texture and geometrical similarities are fused using a stacked regressor to model the PC visual quality. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. An implementation of the metric described in this paper can be found at https://gitlab.com/gpds-unb/pc-gats-metric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]