A visual comfort assessment metric for stereoscopic images

Recent studies have shown that one of the main reasons inducing visual discomfort is accommodation-vergence conflict. To evaluate visual discomfort induced by this conflict, this paper proposes a stereo visual comfort assessment (SVCA) metric based on the measurement of accommodation and vergence for stereoscopic image. Here, accommodation corresponds to the monocular focusing process which is modeled by two-view images' joint entropy; vergence corresponds to binocular fusion which is modeled by two-view images' mutual information. The joint entropy and mutual information are calculated by the visual primitives extracted from two-view images. In this paper, accommodation-vergence conflict is expressed as the ratio of the mutual information over joint entropy. To evaluate the proposed metric, a subjective experiment is conducted to construct a ground truth database. The experimental results show that the proposed SVCA metric achieves a highly competitive performance with some state-of-the-art SVCA models.