Comparing Perceived Quality and Fatigue for Two Methods of Mixed Resolution Stereoscopic Coding

Mixed resolution stereoscopic coding exploits the perceptual phenomenon of binocular suppression by encoding each view of a stereo pair at a different resolution. Many investigations have shown that a large reduction in bandwidth can be gained for a relatively small compromise in image quality by this asymmetric representation. However, the viability of such an encoding method depends on the subjective response to viewing such videos at length. While methods for mixed resolution coding have been developed on the presumption of a certain visual fatigue response, none have actually examined it. In this paper, we address this shortcoming in three experiments comparing two methods of binocular suppression processing. The first two experiments reveal subjects´ preferences in terms of overall quality between the two methods for short exposures, and the third experiment examines the fatigue resulting from 10-min exposures to mixed resolution encoded videos.