Search

Visual saliency on stereoscopic 3D (S3D) images has been shown to be heavily influenced by image quality. Hence, this dependency is an important factor in image quality prediction, image restoration and discomfort reduction, but it is still very difficult to predict such a nonlinear relation in images. In addition, most algorithms specialized in detecting visual saliency on pristine images may unsurprisingly fail when facing distorted images. In this paper, we investigate a deep learning scheme named Deep Visual Saliency (DeepVS) to achieve a more accurate and reliable saliency predictor even in the presence of distortions. Since visual saliency is influenced by low-level features (contrast, luminance and depth information) from a psychophysical point of view, we propose seven low-level features derived from S3D image pairs and utilize them in the context of deep learning to detect visual attention adaptively to human perception. During analysis, it turns out that the low-level features play a role to extract distortion and saliency information. To construct saliency predictors, we weight and model the human visual saliency through two different network architectures, a regression and a fully convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Our results from thorough experiments confirm that the predicted saliency maps are up to 70 % correlated with human gaze patterns, which emphasize the need for the hand-crafted features as input to deep neural networks in S3D saliency detection.

Being able to predict the degree of visual discomfort that is felt when viewing stereoscopic 3D (S3D) images is an important goal toward ameliorating causative factors, such as excessive horizontal disparity, misalignments or mismatches between the left and right views of stereo pairs, or conflicts between different depth cues. Ideally, such a model should account for such factors as capture and viewing geometries, the distribution of disparities, and the responses of visual neurons. When viewing modern 3D displays, visual discomfort is caused primarily by changes in binocular vergence while accommodation in held fixed at the viewing distance to a flat 3D screen. This results in unnatural mismatches between ocular fixations and ocular focus that does not occur in normal direct 3D viewing. This accommodation vergence conflict can cause adverse effects, such as headaches, fatigue, eye strain, and reduced visual ability. Binocular vision is ultimately realized by means of neural mechanisms that subserve the sensorimotor control of eye movements. Realizing that the neuronal responses are directly implicated in both the control and experience of 3D perception, we have developed a model-based neuronal and statistical framework called the 3D visual discomfort predictor (3D-VDP)that automatically predicts the level of visual discomfort that is experienced when viewing S3D images. 3D-VDP extracts two types of features: 1) coarse features derived from the statistics of binocular disparities and 2) fine features derived by estimating the neural activity associated with the processing of horizontal disparities. In particular, we deploy a model of horizontal disparity processing in the extrastriate middle temporal region of occipital lobe. We compare the performance of 3D-VDP with other recent discomfort prediction algorithms with respect to correlation against recorded subjective visual discomfort scores,and show that 3D-VDP is statistically superior to the other methods.

Compressive sensing (CS) makes it possible to more naturally create compact representations of data with respect to a desired data rate. Through wavelet decomposition, smooth and piecewise smooth signals can be represented as sparse and compressible coefficients. These coefficients can then be effectively compressed via the CS. Since a wavelet transform divides image information into layered blockwise wavelet coefficients over spatial and frequency domains, visual improvement can be attained by an appropriate perceptually weighted CS scheme. We introduce such a method in this paper and compare it with the conventional CS. The resulting visual CS model is shown to deliver improved visual reconstructions.