Half-Occluded Regions and Detection of Pseudoscopy

We propose that left- and right-half-occlusion regions contain information that can distinguish between stereoscopic and pseudoscopic display conditions. A machine vision method is presented based on this idea, which detects pseudo copy using only the histograms of left and right half-occlusion pixel locations. Two psychophysical experiments are described which study the ability of human viewers to detect, or be influenced by, pseudoscopic display. The results of this study show that, during free viewing of HD 3D video imagery, humans judged pseudoscopic imagery to be of lower quality than stereoscopic imagery. Subjects performed at a 72% rate in deciding whether a short 5-second video clip was presented stereoscopically or pseudoscopically. Subjects were observed to fixate on half-occlusion regions with a frequency of 15.8%, as opposed to a frequency of 7.8% indicated by random chance. Viewers more frequently (17.4%) fixated on half-occlusion regions when making correct decisions then when they were incorrect (11.9%).