Evaluation of stereoscopic stills : beyond the 2-D quality model

Subjective image quality is a standard evaluation criterion for 2-D imaging systems. However, when applied to 3-D imaging systems, it does not incorporate the added value of depth that is present in 3-D content. Higher level evaluation criteria are proposed that are sensitive to both image quality and depth. A 3-D quality model was constructed in which such higher level evaluation criteria (naturalness and viewing experience) were factored in a weighted sum of image quality and depth. An experiment was performed to evaluate this model. Two scenes were varied in depth (using came base distances) and image quality (using white Gaussian noise) and evaluated in terms of naturalness, viewing experience, image quality, and depth. Analysis revealed that both naturalness and viewing experience reflect image quality to a similar degree, yet the added value of depth was slightly more incorporated by naturalness than by viewing experience.