JOURNAL OF DISPLAY TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 10, NO. 5, MAY 2014 373
Stereoscopic Visual Attention Guided Disparity
Control for Multiview Images
Jianjun Lei, Member, IEEE, Shiqiu Li, Bingren Wang, Kefeng Fan, and Chunpin
gHou
Abstract—Disparity control plays an important role in 3D
stereoscopic displays. It aims to produce high-quality 3D images
and videos which can offer realistic visual experien
ces. We propose
a disparity control method guided by stereoscopic visual attention.
Firstly, the fundamental prin ciple of disparity control is derived.
Then, a stereoscopic visual attention mo
del is introduced to get
the key-point of disparity control. Finally, the disparity control
for multiview images is conducted based on the stereoscopic
visual attention model and the princ
iple of disparity control. The
experimental results on multiview sequences demonstrate that
the proposed method is effective. The salient regions detected by
the proposed stereoscopic vis
ual attention model are displayed as
the viewer’s expectation, and the vivid 3D scenes are presented in
autostereoscopic displays.
Index Terms—Disparity control, stereoscopic visual attention,
multiview, autostereoscopic display.
I. INTRODU CTION
T
HREE-DIMENSIONAL (3D) display technologies,
which provide realistic and vivid visual experiences, are
receiving much attention in a number of areas, including 3D
cinema, 3DTV, and mobile phones [1], [2]. The classic 3D
movies and 3D T V systems based on conventio nal stereoscopic
vision provide a 3D experien ce throu gh special-purp ose glasses
without a motio n parallax. The m ultiview 3D techniques,
which do not require the use of special glasses, have received
widespread attention recently [3]. Among these techniques,
integral imaging and multiview autostereoscopic display are
widely researched. I n an integral imaging system, 2D elemental
images of a 3D scene are generated by a microlens array, and
each elemental image presents a different perspective of the 3D
scene. Then the recorded 2D elemental images are displayed by
an optical device placed in front of another microlens array to
reconstruct the 3D image. Thus, there is a real reconstruction o f
the light structure pro duced by the original 3D scene [4], [5]. In
multiview autostereoscopic display, multiview images obtained
Manuscript received January 28, 2014; revised February 21, 2014; accepted
March 16, 2014. Date of publication March 20, 2014; date of current version
April 14, 2014. This w ork was supported in part by the Natural Science Founda-
tion of China (No. 61271324, 60932007, 61101224, 61202266), and by Natural
Science Foundation of Tianjin (No. 12JCYBJC10400).
J. Le i is with the School of Electronic Information Engineering, Tianjin
University, Tianjin 300072, China, and also with the Department of E lectr ical
Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA (e-mail:
jjleitg@gmail.com).
S. Li, B. Wang, an d C. Hou are with the Scho ol of Electr on ic Information
Engineering, Tianjin U niv er sity, Tianjin 300072 China.
K. Fan is w ith China E lectr on ics Stan dardization Institute, Beijing 100007,
China.
Color versions of one or more of the fig ur es are available o n line at http://
ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JDT.2014.2312648
by an array of cam eras are displayed on parallax barrier or
lenticular autostereoscopic display. It can support the rendering
of a 3D scene from various viewpoints, and offer better access
to 3D co nten t [6]–[8].
The quality o f multiview images plays an important role in
multiview autostereoscopic display. Usually, multiview images
for autostereoscopic display can be divided into two typ es ac-
cording to the layout of camera array, namely, toed-in m ul-
tiview images and parallel multiview im ages. Original multi-
view images obtained from cameras usually have stereoscopic
distortions, wh ich may cause visual fatigue. Vergence and dis-
parity control are vitally i mportant to ensure the clear and nat-
ural display of multiview images. However, multiview images
captured by toed-in camera array invariably suffer from vertical
disparity and keystone distortion, which cannot b e el iminated
by vergence and dispa rity control [9]. Original multiview im-
ages captured by parallel camera array only have negative hor-
izontal disparity. This differs from actually viewing the scene,
thus causing all the contents to be viewed as though they are
in front of the screen. Unlike vertical disparity and keystone
distortion, the defect caused by parallel camera array can be
compensated through vergence and disparity control. Kwon et
al. proposed a binocular stereoscopic camera vergence contro l
method using disparity information by the simple image pro-
cessing [10]. However, the multiview camera array was not
mentioned. Deng et al. developed a tri-view vergence control
method using parallel cam era array with shift [11]. Although
the method gets parallel images with both positive and negative
disparities, it only suits for fixed depth scenes due to its inflex-
ibility of shif ti ng manuall y or setting the shifting range in the
camera. In [12], we used mean shift algorithm to obtain the ob-
ject in the central region, and set it as the zero disparity object.
The d ispar ity control was then realized by shifting stereoscopic
images accordingly.
However, none of the above methods took stereoscopic visu al
attention into consideration. It has been highligh ted in previous
researches that visual attention, usu a lly modeled as saliency de-
tection, is very important when addressing 3D human visual
perception [13]. Stereoscopic visual attention model utilizin g
depth information emphasizes depth perception and simulates
human visual system more accurately [14]–[16]. In this paper,
we propose a disparity control meth od gu ided by stereoscop ic
visual attention. Firstly, we derive the fundamental p ri ncip le of
disparity con tro l. The salient regions of multiview images are
then extracted based on stereoscopic visual attention. Finally,
the center of the salient regions is set as the k ey-point of dis-
parity control, and disparity control i s achieved by shiftin g the
multiview images.
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