Visual attention analysis on stereoscopic images for subjective discomfort evaluation

By analyzing the statistical behaviors on human visual attention, we discover a clue that the fixation behaviors are highly correlated with how much the viewers feel visual discomfort on stereoscopic images differently from conventional subjective assessments. In order to quantify the correlation between visual attention and discomfort, we explore a novel methodology termed transition of visual attention (ToVA) according to various disparities, which accounts depth attributes of 3D images by eye-tracker experiments. Moreover, the saliency entropy is defined to quantify the distribution of fixations for 3D images. Then, we measure ToVA in terms of the relative saliency entropy using Kullback-Leibler divergence. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of ToVA, a successful example application is also provided, whereby ToVA is applied to obtaining subjective results of measuring discomfort experienced when viewing 3D displays rather than relying on the conventional subjective test by using scoring system.