The influence of 3D video artifacts on discomfort of 302 viewers

Today, numerous movies are produced in stereoscopic format. Despite the improvement in stereo technology, stereoscopic artifacts that cause headaches and other viewer discomfort continue to appear even in high-budget films. Existing automatic quality-control algorithms can detect distortions in stereoscopic images, but they fail to account for a viewer's subjective perception of those distortions. We propose a method of automatic subjective quality evaluation that uses technical parameters of stereoscopic scenes. It is based on subjective scores and brain-activity measurements using electroencephalography (EEG) to assess viewer discomfort. We conducted a series of experiments with active and passive stereo cinema technology. An audience of 302 participants watched 60 video sequences from stereoscopic movies containing artificially added geometric, color and temporal artifacts. Our analysis of the data revealed the dependencies between the degree of viewer discomfort and the intensity of the distortions. Scenes with temporal mismatch between the stereoscopic views caused the most discomfort among viewers. Future work will focus on creating models based on this data and using them to predict audience discomfort caused by watching stereoscopic movies.