Measurement of parallax distribution, and its application to the analysis of visual comfort for stereoscopic HDTV

The relationship between visual comfort and parallax distribution for stereoscopic HDTV has been studied(1). In this study, we first examined a method for measuring this parallax distribution. As it is important to understand the characteristics of the distribution in a frame or temporal changes of the characteristics, rather than having detailed information on the parallax at every point, we propose a method to measure the parallax based on the phase correlation. It includes a way of reducing the measurement error depending on the phase correlation method. The method was used to measure stereoscopic HDTV images with good results. Secondly, we conducted a subjective evaluation test of visual comfort and sense of presence using 48 different stereoscopic HDTV pictures, and compared the results with the parallax distributions in these pictures measured by the proposed method. The comparison showed that the range of parallax distribution and the average parallax distribution significantly affect visual comfort when viewing stereoscopic HDTV images. It is also suggested that the range of parallax distribution in many of the images that were judged comfortable to view is located within approximate 0.3Diopter.