Irrelevance reduction of the depth information in stereo images
Bernd Kost · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1990
The stereoscopic depth perception is known to be a very sensitive function of the human visual system. Against the background of a necessary data-compression in threedimensional television systems (3DTV) with 'look-around capability' (multi-viewpoint-systems) some experimental results about irrelevance reduction in respect of the depth infovmation will be given. The main emphasis is on the quanlization of disparities, which represent the binocular depth information. In the first of two experiments, 3D b/w stills of four natural scenes were used. The disparities of the stereo-image pair were calculated by a correlation method and subsequently used for reconstruction of test stereo pairs. Several stereo-image pairs, differing by degree of quantization errors, were assessed by non-expert observers. The second experiment was carried out with stereo-image sequences of simple moving patterns. Results show that the depth resolution of a TV-stereo-image pair could be considerably coarser than is predicted from visual depth acuity. Some aspects of spatial bandwidth iduction of the disparity data as a further step to irrelevance iduction will also be discussed.