skip to main content
research-article

Perceptual Tolerance to Stereoscopic 3D Image Distortion

Published:21 July 2015Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

An intriguing aspect of picture perception is the viewer’s tolerance to variation in viewing position, perspective, and display size. These factors are also present in stereoscopic media, where there are additional parameters associated with the camera arrangement (e.g., separation, orientation). The predicted amount of depth from disparity can be obtained trigonometrically; however, perceived depth in complex scenes often differs from geometric predictions based on binocular disparity alone. To evaluate the extent and the cause of deviations from geometric predictions of depth from disparity in naturalistic scenes, we recorded stereoscopic footage of an indoor scene with a range of camera separations (camera interaxial (IA) ranged from 3 to 95 mm) and displayed them on a range of screen sizes. In a series of experiments participants estimated 3D distances in the scene relative to a reference scene, compared depth between shots with different parameters, or reproduced the depth between pairs of objects in the scene using reaching or blind walking. The effects of IA and screen size were consistently and markedly smaller than predicted from the binocular viewing geometry, suggesting that observers are able to compensate for the predicted distortions. We conclude that the presence of multiple realistic monocular depth cues drives normalization of perceived depth from binocular disparity. It is not clear to what extent these differences are due to cognitive as opposed to perceptual factors. However, it is notable that these normalization processes are not task specific; they are evident in both perception- and action-oriented tasks.

References

  1. Robert S. Allison. 2007. Analysis of the influence of vertical disparities arising in toed-in stereoscopic cameras. Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 51, 4, 317--327.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  2. Robert S. Allison and Ian P. Howard. 2000. Temporal dependencies in resolving monocular and binocular cue conflict in slant perception. Vision Research 40, 14, 1869--1885. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0042-6989(00)00034-1Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  3. Robert S. Allison, Laurie M. Wilcox, and Ali Kazimi. 2013. Perceptual artefacts, suspension of disbelief and realism in stereoscopic 3D film. Public 24, 47, 149--160. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/public.24.47.14_1Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  4. Martin S. Banks, Emily A. Cooper, and Elise A. Piazza. 2014. Camera focal length and the perception of pictures. Ecological Psychology 26, 1--2, 30--46. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2014.877284Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  5. Martin S. Banks, Robert T. Held, and Ahna R. Girshick. 2009. Perception of 3-D layout in stereo displays. Information Display 25, 1, 12--16.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  6. Karim Benzeroual, Robert S. Allison, and Laurie M. Wilcox. 2011a. Distortions of space in stereoscopic 3D content. In Proceedings of the SMPTE International Conference on Stereoscopic 3D for Media and Entertainment. 6.1--6.10.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. Karim Benzeroual, Laurie M. Wilcox, and Robert S. Allison. 2011b. On the distinction between perceived and predicted depth in S3D films. In Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on 3D Imaging (IC3D’11). 59.1--59.8.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. Heinrich H. Bülthoff and Hanspeter A. Mallot. 1988. Integration of depth modules: Stereo and shading. Journal of the Optical Society of America A 5, 10, 1749--1758. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/JOSAA.5.001749Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  9. Songpei Du, Shimin Hu, and Ralph Martin. 2013. Changing perspective in stereoscopic images. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 19, 8, 1288--1297. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2013.14 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. John M. Foley. 1980. Binocular distance perception. Psychological Review 87, 5, 411--434.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  11. Andrew Glennerster, Lili Tcheang, Stuart J. Gilson, Andrew W. Fitzgibbon, and Andrew J. Parker. 2006. Humans ignore motion and stereo cues in favor of a fictional stable world. Current Biology 16, 4, 428--432. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.01.019Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  12. Melvyn A. Goodale. 2014. How (and why) the visual control of action differs from visual perception. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281, 1785, 20140337. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.0337Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  13. James M. Hillis, Simon J. Watt, Michael S. Landy, and Martin S. Banks. 2004. Slant from texture and disparity cues: Optimal cue combination. Journal of Vision 4, 12, 967--992. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1167/4.12.1Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  14. Jonathan W. Kelly, Melissa Burton, Brice Pollock, Eduardo Rubio, Michael Curtis, Julio De La Cruz, Stephen Gilbert, and Eliot Winer. 2013. Space perception in virtual environments: Displacement from the center of projection causes less distortion than predicted by cue-based models. ACM Transactions on Applied Perception 10, 4, 18:1--18:23. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2536764.2536765 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  15. Jack M. Loomis, Jos A. da Silva, Naofumi Fujita, and Sergio S. Fukusima. 1992. Visual space perception and visually directed action. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 18, 4, 906--921. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.18.4.906Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  16. H. A. Sedgwick. 1993. The effects of viewpoint on the virtual space of pictures. In Pictorial Communication in Virtual and Real Environments, S. R. Ellis, M. K. Kaiser, and A. J. Grunwald (Eds.). CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 460--479. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  17. Takashi Shibata, Joohwan Kim, David M. Hoffman, and Martin S. Banks. 2011. The zone of comfort: Predicting visual discomfort with stereo displays. Journal of Vision 11, 8, Article No. 11. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1167/11.8.11Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  18. Raymond Spottiswoode and Nigel Spottiswoode. 1953. The Theory of Stereoscopic Transmission and Its Application to the Motion Picture. University of California Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  19. Stanley Stevens. 1962. The surprising simplicity of sensory metrics. American Psychologist 17, 1, 29--39. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0045795Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  20. Peter Vangorp, Christian Richardt, Emily A. Cooper, Gaurav Chaurasia, Martin S. Banks, and George Drettakis. 2013. Perception of perspective distortions in image-based rendering. ACM Transactions on Graphics 32, 4, 58:1--58:12. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2461912.2461971 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  21. Dhanraj Vishwanath, Ahna R. Girshick, and Martin S. Banks. 2005. Why pictures look right when viewed from the wrong place. Nature Neuroscience 8, 10, 1401--1410. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn1553Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  22. Zachary Wartell, Larry F. Hodges, and William Ribarsky. 1999. Balancing fusion, image depth and distortion in stereoscopic head-tracked displays. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. 351--358. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  23. Laurie M. Wilcox and Robert S. Allison. 2009. Coarse-fine dichotomies in human stereopsis. Vision Research 49, 22, 2653--65. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2009.06.004Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  24. Andrew J. Woods, Tom Docherty, and Rolf Koch. 1993. Image distortions in stereoscopic video systems. In Proceedings of SPIE 1915: Stereoscopic Displays and Applications IV. 36--48. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.157041Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

Index Terms

  1. Perceptual Tolerance to Stereoscopic 3D Image Distortion

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Login options

      Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

      Sign in

      Full Access

      • Published in

        cover image ACM Transactions on Applied Perception
        ACM Transactions on Applied Perception  Volume 12, Issue 3
        July 2015
        92 pages
        ISSN:1544-3558
        EISSN:1544-3965
        DOI:10.1145/2798084
        Issue’s Table of Contents

        Copyright © 2015 ACM

        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 21 July 2015
        • Revised: 1 May 2015
        • Accepted: 1 May 2015
        • Received: 1 February 2015
        Published in tap Volume 12, Issue 3

        Permissions

        Request permissions about this article.

        Request Permissions

        Check for updates

        Qualifiers

        • research-article
        • Research
        • Refereed

      PDF Format

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader