Comfort assessment of border effects in stereoscopic images

Abstract

Three-dimensional television (3D-TV) adopts two-view stereoscopic 3D (S3D) images with a special watching mechanism. Perfect stereoscopic visual comfort experience can bring enhanced depth perception. Actually, there are numerous potential sources of adverse effects make visual discomfort. Border effects are the usual scenarios that lead to visual discomfort due to the depth conflict between the border objects and screen border in the 3D perceptual space. In this paper, we focus on how the border effects affect visual discomfort and fatigue. We investigate the visual features of border objects qualify the the visual comfort, including border object disparity, border object thickness, border object blur and border object color contrast. The visual features of border objects are extracted to qualify the visual comfort level induced by border effects. To have a better performance evaluation on visual comfort of border effects, we design our stereoscopic images database VBED (Visual Border Effect Database) focusing on various border objects dependent visual features. Experimental results demonstrate that the combined use of various object dependent visual features can achieve effective border effects prediction.