Visual comfort prediction for stereoscopic image using stereoscopic visual saliency

Abstract

Perceptually salient regions of stereoscopic images significantly affect visual comfort (VC). In this paper, we propose a new objective approach for predicting VC of stereoscopic images according to visual saliency. The proposed approach includes two stages. The first stage involves the extraction of foreground saliency and depth contrast from a disparity map to generate a depth saliency map, which in turn is combined with 2D saliency to obtain a stereoscopic visual saliency map. The second stage involves the extraction of saliency-weighted VC features, and feeding them into a prediction metric to produce VC scores of the stereoscopic images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared with the conventional prediction methods on the IVY Lab database, with performance gain ranging from 0.016 to 0.198 in terms of correlation coefficients.