Perceptual enhancement for stereoscopic videos based on horopter consistency

Abstract

Audience discomfort, such as eye strain and dizziness, is one of the urgent issues that virtual reality and 3D movie technologies should tackle. Except for inappropriate horizontal and vertical disparity, one major problem is that people's binocular vergence and focal length in the cinema remain inconsistent from normal visual habits. Psychologists discovered the horopter and Panum's fusional area to describe zero-disparity points projected on the retinas based on accommodation-convergence consistency. In this paper, inspired by these concepts, we propose a stereoscopic effect correction system for perceptual enhancement according to fixated region and scene information. As a preprocessing step, tracking and stereo matching algorithms are implemented to prepare cues for further transformation in 3D space. Then in order to accomplish certain visual effects, we describe a geometric framework for disparity refinement and image warping based on parameter adjustment of the virtual stereoscopic rig. For evaluation, subjective experiments have been conducted to prove the effectiveness of our method. Therefore, our work provides a possibility to improve the audience experience from a formerly underexplored perspective.