Visual Discomfort Visualizer using Stereo Vision and Time-of-Flight Depth Cameras

Visual discomfort monitoring is an important technique for comfortable viewing of stereoscopic images. This paper proposes a novel monitoring system of visual discomfort that takes advantages of a fusion camera system equipped with stereo vision cameras and a time-of-flight camera. We improve disparity map enhancement technique to obtain a high-quality disparity map that is aligned to the right view color image coordinate. The captured stereo-plus-disparity images are used for visual discomfort visualizer that automatically predicts overall degree of perceived visual discomfort and visualizes which regions are problematic in terms of visual discomfort. The proposed visual discomfort visualizer is based on visual importance of image scenes, resulting in considerable improvement in prediction performance of visual discomfort. The experimental results showed that the proposed system could generate enhanced disparity maps and achieve visual discomfort prediction accuracy that is feasible for practical applications.