Dichotomy between luminance and disparity features at binocular fixations

Abstract

Analysis of the statistics of natural scene features at observers' fixations can help us understand the mechanism of fixation selection and visual attention of the human vision system. Previous studies revealed that several low-level luminance features at fixations are statistically different from those at randomly selected locations. In our study, we conducted eye tracking experiments on naturalistic stereo images presented through a haploscope and found that fixated luminance contrast and luminance gradient are generally higher than randomly selected luminance contrast and luminance gradient, which agrees with previous literature, but the fixated disparity contrast and disparity gradient are generally lower than randomly selected disparity contrast and disparity gradient. We discuss the relevance of our findings in the context of the complexity of disparity calculations and the metabolic needs of disparity processing.