Stereo image compression: the importance of spatial resolution in half-occluded regions

摘要

This paper reports on the visibility of spatial details located in those regions of a stereo pair that are seen by one eye only. In normal viewing, these regions correspond to areas of a scene that are occluded by nearer objects for one eye or the other - so-called half occluded regions (or monocular regions). We assumed that the resolving power of human vision in binocular regions would be higher than that in half-occluded regions because of the effect of binocular summation. If it were true, high spatial frequency components in half-occluded regions could be reduced without impairment of the subjective image quality. A comparison test of the visual resolving power for (spatially) low-pass filtered and nonfiltered patterns in half-occluded regions was carried out. The experiment showed, however, that any impairment visible in binocular regions was also visible in half-occluded regions. Thus the assumption has been falsified, and for the purpose of stereo image coding no irrelevant data elimination can be carried out in half-occluded regions.