  Recently, point clouds have shown to be a promising way to represent 3D
visual data for a wide range of immersive applications, from augmented reality
to autonomous cars. Emerging imaging sensors have made easier to perform richer
and denser point cloud acquisition, notably with millions of points, thus
raising the need for efficient point cloud coding solutions. In such a
scenario, it is important to evaluate the impact and performance of several
processing steps in a point cloud communication system, notably the quality
degradations associated to point cloud coding solutions. Moreover, since point
clouds are not directly visualized but rather processed with a rendering
algorithm before shown on any display, the perceived quality of point cloud
data highly depends on the rendering solution. In this context, the main
objective of this paper is to study the impact of several coding and rendering
solutions on the perceived user quality and in the performance of available
objective quality assessment metrics. Another contribution regards the
assessment of recent MPEG point cloud coding solutions for several popular
rendering methods which were never presented before. The conclusions regard the
visibility of three types of coding artifacts for the three considered
rendering approaches as well as the strengths and weakness of objective quality
metrics when point clouds are rendered after coding.
