Towards a Metric of Antialiasing Sufficiency for Stereoscopic Displays

This paper describes the development, measurement, computation, and initial testing of a metric of antialiasing sufficiency for stereoscopic display systems. A summary is provided of two previous evaluations that demonstrated stereoscopic disparity thresholds in the range of 3 to 10 arcsec are attainable using electronic displays with a pixel pitch as coarse as 2.5 arcmin, however, only if sufficient antialiasing is performed. Equations are provided that describe the critical level of antialiasing required as a function of pixel pitch. The proposed metric uses a radial test pattern that can be photographed from the user eyepoint using a hand held consumer color camera. Several candidate unitary metrics that quantify the spatial sampling noise in the measured test pattern were tested. The correlation obtained between the best candidate metric and the stereoscopic disparity threshold model from our previous paper was R-2 = 0.994. The standard deviation of repeated measurements with a hand held camera was less than 0.5% of the range of the metric, indicating the metric is capable of discriminating fine differences in sampling noise. The proposed method is display technology independent and requires no knowledge of the display pixel structure or how the antialiasing is implemented.