With the upcoming emergence of the IEEE P3333.1.4 standard, the first ever standardization document on the subjective quality assessment of light field visualization, we are approaching a major milestone of light field Quality of Experience (QoE). The research efforts leading up to this point have answered the fundamental questions regarding perceptual thresholds and personal preference, and best practices regarding research methodologies have been formed. However, in order to introduce successful and efficient light field systems and services, research questions beyond perceptual thresholds and personal preference must be addressed, along with the associated methodologies. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive set of novel research questions and methodologies regarding light field QoE. Our work also provides a detailed discussion of related factors, particularly those that extend to test participants and thus may affect the results of subjective studies.

With the increasing research focus on light field imaging in recent years, it has become essential for researchers in this field to either benefit from access to equipped laboratories with light field acquisition devices and displays or to have access to publicly available light field imaging datasets. Some datasets are indeed available, each with a different nature. For instance, some contain real world images or sources while others are based on purely synthetic images or sources generated by computer graphic tools; others are a combination of both. Datasets for the quality assessment of light field content include pristine light field content as well as sources affected by different levels of impairments. The latter are tested subjectively by a panel of viewers and often objective metrics are also calculated. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative review of 33 publicly available datasets that span from content-only datasets to specific task based datasets and quality assessment datasets. While our aim is to review and investigate what each dataset has to offer and which tests had been considered by their proposers, we also take the opportunity to leverage the results of previous studies to identify and discuss the challenges ahead and identify the areas with potential for improvement.