Quantifying perceptual resolution for autostereoscopic three-dimensional displays

The perceptual experience issue is particularly important for autostereoscopic three-dimensional (3D) displays since the perceptual resolution has a great correlation between panel resolution and other 3D display performances, but normally used effective resolution only considers the amount of information being sent to a certain viewing point. This work describes that the visual factors should be taken into consideration associated with resolution and contrast simultaneously to evaluate perceptual 3D resolution. We propose a quantitative evaluation of perceptual resolution of 3D displays from modulated contrast based on the contrast sensitivity function (CSF). A switchable parallax-barrier display and a directional backlight display providing glasses-free autostereoscopic vision are experimentally studied to verify the validity of the characterization. Due to the nonlinear response of the CSF threshold curve, less than 50% of the panel resolution in parallax-barrier 3D displays is perceived, while the display with directional backlight illumination is shown to retain the panel resolution for perceptual experience as expected. We foresee that this study provides a practically objective paradigm to characterize the subjective perceptual resolution and the presented perceptual resolution can be served as a design guideline to achieve an improved 3D viewing experience.