Assessment of Perceptual Depth Intensity on Source Stereoscopic Images

Accurate and efficient objective assessment methods for multidimensional quality of experience (QoE) of stereoscopic 3D content are in urgent demand. Especially, depth perception quantization for source 3D content is necessary to optimize the comprehensive QoE. A few studies evaluate the depth quality degradation due to compression or transmission, while the objective assessment of perceptual depth intensity has not been deeply investigated. In this paper, we propose a depth intensity metric (DIM) to simulate subjective evaluation on uncompressed source 3D images. Considering the multi-cue aggregation mechanism in depth perception as well as visual characteristic of binocular fusion, perceptual features are extracted from binocular and monocular cues to generate the depth intensity perception score. The effectiveness of DIM is verified by conducting subjective experiment on publicly available stereoscopic image databases. Experimental results demonstrate that DIM can achieve higher accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art depth intensity metric.