Subjective study of binocular rivalry in stereoscopic images with transmission and compression artifacts

Binocular rivalry is a visual phenomenon that occurs when two eyes are presented with different patterns. Instead of being fused to form a unitary visual impression, the two patterns may be perceived alternately or evoke a peculiar shimmering effect. In stereoscopic images, corresponding regions in two views may be dissimilar due to artifacts from lossy video processing, e.g., transmission and compression. In this case, binocular rivalry may be introduced, which impairs 3D visual quality. In this paper, we established a database of binocular rivalry artifacts in stereoscopic images with transmission and compression distortions. Ten subjects were engaged to mark binocular rivalry artifacts in ten stereoscopic images. The performance of each subject was analyzed using the hit rate and false alarm rate of the subject compared with the average marking results of the other subjects. The subjective data were then combined into maps which indicate the locations and strength of the rivalry artifacts in the stereo pairs. The database is aimed to facilitate the validation of binocular rivalry artifact detection algorithms, and provides cues for stereoscopic 3D quality assessment and binocular rivalry artifact removal.