Subjective and Objective Quality of Experience of Free Viewpoint Videos

Free viewpoint videos (FVVs) provide immersive experiences for end-users, and they have been applied in many applications, such as movies, sports, and TV shows. However, the development of quantifying the quality of experience (QoE) of FVVs is still relatively slow due to the high costs of data collection and limited public databases. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on FVV QoE. First, we construct the largest, to the best of our knowledge, FVV QoE database called Youku-FVV from two complex real scenarios, i. e., entertainment and sports. Specifically, Youku-FVV originates from the videos captured by dozens of real cameras arranged annularly. We use these videos to generate virtual viewpoints, which make up FVVs together with real views. In constructing the FVV QoE database, we consider both internal and external influencing factors of QoE, which correspond to FVV generation and playback, respectively. Besides, we make an initial attempt to train an efficient no reference FVV QoE prediction model using this database, where several sparse frame sampling strategies are validated. And we demonstrate the feasibility of striving for the balance between effectiveness and efficiency of FVV QoE prediction. The proposed FVV QoE database and source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/QTJiebin/FVV_QoE.