Enhanced stereoscopic imaging

In this paper we introduce a new technique designed to optimize stereoscopic depth perception of small targets embedded in 3D scenes. Central to the technique is a modified version of an image processing algorithm originally designed for gray scale image enhancement. This has been adapted and modified to adjust the stereoscopic depth in a 3D scene while mostly preserving other depth cues such as perspective, texture gradients, size gradients and occlusion. An experimental study to evaluate the algorithm showed that enhanced stereoscopic depth can enable the detection of targets that would otherwise be missed