Integration of binocular disparity and monocular cues at near threshold level

Abstract

We examined the dependency of the integration of multiple depth cues upon the combined cues and upon the consistency of depth information from different cues. For each observer, depth thresholds were measured by the use of stimuli in which different depth cues (motion parallax, binocular disparity, and monocular configuration) specified the surface undulating sinusoidally with different spatial frequencies and different phases. Analysis of d ′ showed that the performance was better than the prediction of probability summation only when parallax and disparity cues specified an undulation with the same spatial frequency and same phase. The probability summation model overestimated the performance for the other conditions of combination of disparity and parallax, and for all of the conditions of combination of disparity and monocular configuration. These results suggest that the improvement in depth perception caused by integration of multiple cues depends on the type of combined cues, and that the visual system possibly integrates the depth information from different cues at different stages of the visual processing.