Point cloud data is a large collection of high dimensional 3D points with 3D coordinates and attributes, which has been one of the mainstream representations for emerging 3D applications, such as virtual reality, autonomous vehicles and robotics. Due to the large-scale unstructured high-dimensional nature of point clouds, point cloud processing, transmitting and analysing has been challenging issues in multimedia signal processing and communication. Deep learning is a powerful tool to learn statistical knowledge from massive data. Advances in artificial intelligence, especially deep learning models are offering new opportunities for point cloud processing, compression and analysis. This special issue aims at promoting cutting-edge research on deep learning-based point cloud processing, including object detection, segmentation, registration, compression, and visual quality assessment.

The concept of video-wise just noticeable difference (JND) was recently proposed to determine the lowest bitrate at which a source video can be compressed without perceptible quality loss with a given probability. This bitrate is usually obtained from an estimate of the satisfied used ratio (SUR) at each bitrate, respectively encoding quality parameter. The SUR is the probability that the distortion corresponding to this bitrate is not noticeable. Commonly, the SUR is computed experimentally by estimating the subjective JND threshold of each subject using binary search, fitting a distribution model to the collected data, and creating the complementary cumulative distribution function of the distribution. The subjective tests consist of paired comparisons between the source video and compressed versions. However, we show that this approach typically over- or underestimates the SUR. To address this shortcoming, we directly estimate the SUR function by considering the entire population as a collective observer. Our method randomly chooses the subject for each paired comparison and uses a state-of-the-art Bayesian adaptive psychometric method (QUEST+) to select the compressed video in the paired comparison. Our simulations show that this collective method yields more accurate SUR results with fewer comparisons. We also provide a subjective experiment to assess the JND and SUR for compressed video. In the paired comparisons, we apply a flicker test that compares a video that interleaves the source video and its compressed version with the source video. Analysis of the subjective data revealed that the flicker test provides on average higher sensitivity and precision in the assessment of the JND threshold than the usual test that compares compressed versions with the source video. Using crowdsourcing and the proposed approach, we build a JND dataset for 45 source video sequences that are encoded with both  advanced video coding (AVC) and versatile video coding (VVC) at all available quantization parameters.  Our dataset is available at http://database.mmsp-kn.de/flickervidset-database.html.