Displacement error analysis of 6-DoF virtual reality

Abstract

Virtual view synthesis is a critical step in enabling Six-Degrees of Freedom (DoF) immersion experiences in Virtual Reality (VR). It comprises synthesis of virtual viewpoints for a user navigating the immersion environment, based on a small subset of captured viewpoints featuring texture and depth maps. We investigate the extreme values of the displacement error in view synthesis caused by depth map quantization, for a given 6DoF VR video dataset, particularly based on the camera settings, scene properties, and the depth map quantization error. We establish a linear relationship between the displacement error and the quantization error, scaled by the sine of the angle between the location of the object and the virtual view in the 3D scene, formed at the reference camera location. In the majority of cases the horizontal and vertical displacement errors induced at a pixel location of a reconstructed 360° viewpoint comprising the immersion environment are respectively proportional to 3/5 and 1/5 of the respective quantization error. Also, the distance between the reference view and the synthesized view severely increases the displacement error. Following these observations: displacement error values can be predicted for given pixel coordinates and quantization error, and this can serve as a first step towards modeling the relationship between the encoding rate of reference views and the quality of synthesized views.