1Integrating Multiple Views with Virtual Mirrors to Facilitate Scene Understanding

In this paper, an image integration technique called Virtual Mirroring (VM) is evaluated. VM is a technique that combines multiple 2D views of a 3D scene into a single composite image by overlaying views onto virtual mirrors. Given multiple views of a scene, one view is augmented with the remaining views by placing virtual mirrors on the first view and overlaying onto them the corresponding remaining views. Unlike a standard array presentation, where 2D views are not integrated and simply placed adjacent to one another, the VM presentation preserves the relative location, orientation and scale between views. As such, it is our contention that humans will fare better at performing certain visual tasks, such as scene identification, when viewing a 3D scene via a VM presentation than when viewing an array presentation. We performed an experiment on 12 participants, where participants were required to identify 96 scenes both with a VM and an array presentation and compared their % correctness and response times. Moreover, we studied the effects of adding an auditory attentional load on performance. We found that regardless of load, participants were able to identify scenes using VM presentation with greater accuracy and at greater speeds