Compression of stereo images and the evaluation of its effects on 3-d perception1

The proposed approach to stereo image coding takes advantage of the singleness of vision property of the human visual system. Experiments show that a stereo image pair, in which one of the images is low-pass filtered and sub-sampled, is perceived as a sharp 3-D image. The depth information is perceived due to the stereopsis effect, and the sharpness is maintained due to the details in the non-filtered image. A methodology for the evaluation of the compression effects on the 3-D perception of stereo images is presented. It is based on measurements of response-time and accuracy of human subjects performing simple 3-D perception tasks.