  The recent rise in interest in point clouds as an imaging modality has
motivated standardization groups such as MPEG and JPEG Pleno to launch
activities aiming at developing compression standards for point clouds. Lossy
compression usually introduces visual artifacts that negatively impact the
perceived quality of media, which can only be reliably measured through
subjective visual quality assessment experiments. While MPEG standards have
been subjectively evaluated in previous studies on multiple occasions, no work
has yet assessed the performance of the recent JPEG Pleno standard in
comparison to them. In this study, a comprehensive performance evaluation of
MPEG and JPEG Pleno standards for point cloud compression is conducted. The
impact of different configuration parameters on the performance of the codecs
is first analyzed with the help of objective quality metrics. The results from
this analysis are used to define three rate allocation strategies for each
codec, which are employed to compress a set of point clouds at four target
rates. The set of distorted point clouds is then subjectively evaluated
following two subjective quality assessment protocols. Finally, the obtained
results are used to compare the performance of these compression standards and
draw insights about best coding practices.
