Study on the Perception of Sharpness Mismatch In Stereoscopic Video

In this paper, we study an artifact of stereoscopic 3D (S3D) video called sharpness mismatch (SM), that occurs when one view is more blurred than the other. SM beyond a certain level can create visual discomfort, and consequently degrade the quality of experience. Therefore, it is important to measure the just noticeable sharpness mismatch (JNSM), i.e., the minimal level of SM that is perceived by the human visual system and creates discomfort. The knowledge of the JNSM can be used in the evaluation of the quality of S3D video, and more in general when processing S3D video, like in asymmetric compression. In this paper, we focus in particular on the detection of SM. For this goal, we organized a psychophysical experiment with 23 subjects and a crosstalk-free stereoscopic display in order to gather psychophysical data necessary for the development of a SM detection method. Based on the gathered experiment data, we propose a new SM detection method. The evaluation of this method shows that its performance is close but not better than that of the state-of-the-art methods. Therefore, our goal in the near future is to improve the proposed method.