Quality of Visual Experience for 3D Presentation - Stereoscopic Image

Abstract

Three-dimensional television (3DTV) technology is becoming increasingly popular, as it can provide high quality and immersive experience to end users. Stereoscopic imaging is a technique capable of recoding 3D visual information or creating the illusion of depth. Most 3D compression schemes are developed for stereoscopic images including applying traditional two-dimensional (2D) compression techniques, and considering theories of binocular suppression as well. The compressed stereoscopic content is delivered to customers through communication channels. However, both compression and transmission errors may degrade the quality of stereoscopic images. Subjective quality assessment is the most accurate way to evaluate the quality of visual presentations in either 2D or 3D modality, even though it is time-consuming. This chapter will offer an introduction to related issues in perceptual quality assessment for stereoscopic images. Our results are a subjective quality experiment on stereoscopic images and focusing on four typical distortion types including Gaussian blurring, JPEG compression, JPEG2000 compression, and white noise. Furthermore, although many 2D image quality metrics have been proposed that work well on 2D images, developing quality metrics for 3D visual content is almost an unexplored issue. Therefore, this chapter will further introduce some well-known 2D image quality metrics and investigate their capabilities in stereoscopic image quality assessments. As an important attribute of stereoscopic images, disparity refers to the difference in image location of an object seen by the left and right eyes, which has a significant impact on the stereoscopic image quality assessment. Thus, a study on an integration of the disparity information in quality assessment is presented. The experimental results demonstrated that better performance can be achieved if the disparity information and original images are combined appropriately in the stereoscopic image quality assessment.