Sharpness Mismatch Detection in Stereoscopic Content with 360-Degree Capability

This paper presents a novel sharpness mismatch detection method for stereoscopic images based on the comparison of edge width histograms of the left and right view. The new method is evaluated on the LIVE 3D Phase II and Ningbo 3D Phase I datasets and compared with two state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that the new method highly correlates with user scores of subjective tests and that it outperforms the current state-of-the-art. We then extend the method to stereoscopic omnidirectional images by partitioning the images into patches using a spherical Voronoi diagram. Furthermore, we integrate visual attention data into the detection process in order to weight sharpness mismatch according to the likelihood of its appearance in the viewport of the end-user's virtual reality device. For obtaining visual attention data, we performed a subjective experiment with 17 test subjects and 96 stereoscopic omnidirectional images. The entire dataset including the viewport trajectory data and resulting visual attention maps are publicly available with this paper.