Out-of-focus artifacts mitigation and autofocus methods for 3D displays

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel content-aware method for automatic focusing of the scene on a 3D display. The method addresses a common problem that visualized content is often out of focus, which adversely affects perceived 3D content. The method outperforms existing focusing method, having the error lower by almost 30%. The existing and novel focusing is extended with depth-of-field enhancement of the scene to mitigate out-of-focus artifacts. The relation between the total depth range of the scene and the visual quality of the result is discussed and evaluated according to human perception experiments. A space-warping method for synthetic scenes is proposed to reduce out-of-focus artifacts while maintaining the scene appearance. A user study was conducted to evaluate the proposed methods and identify the crucial parameters in the scene-focusing process on the 3D stereoscopic display by Looking Glass Factory. The study confirmed the efficiency of the proposals and discovered that the depth-of-field artifact mitigation might not be suitable for all scenes despite theoretical hypotheses. The overall proposal of this paper is a set of methods that can be used to produce the best user experience with an arbitrary scene displayed on a 3D display.