Definition of Common Test Conditions for the new JPEG Pleno holography standard

Abstract

The JPEG committee started the definition of a new standard for holographic content coding under the project JPEG Pleno (ISO/IEC 21794). As a first standardization effort targeting holographic content, multiple challenges were faced, notably to select appropriate testing content, type of anchors to be used for comparison with proponent's proposals and how to evaluate the quality for this type of content. This paper describes the development and options of the Common Test Conditions (CTC) defined to evaluate the responses to the call for proposals. The application of standard coding technology developed for image/video compression to holographic content led to several complicated issues to solve related to appropriate anchor selection and the generation of test content. Furthermore, knowledge on how to evaluate compression methodologies for holographic data was very limited until recently. Relevant studies typically use signal fidelity for quality evaluation by computing the SNR or the PSNR between the signal and correspondent decoded signal versions, in the hologram plane or the object plane, respectively. Although signal fidelity is always a measure of the ability of the compression technology to recreate a similar signal, it is usually not the best metric for perceptual evaluation. This paper describes the methodologies defined in the CTC for the perceptual and objective quality evaluation of the holographic data.