Perception of detail in 3D images

A lot of current 3D displays suffer from the fact that their spatial resolution is lower compared to their 2D counterparts. One reason for this is that the multiple views needed to generate 3D are often spatially multiplexed. Besides this, imperfect separation of the left- and right-eye view leads to blurring or ghosting, and therefore to a decrease in perceived sharpness. However, people watching stereoscopic videos have reported that the 3D scene contained more details, compared to the 2D scene with identical spatial resolution. This is an interesting notion, that has never been tested in a systematic and quantitative way. To investigate this effect, we had people compare the amount of detail (”detailedness”) in pairs of 2D and 3D images. A blur filter was applied to one of the two images, and the blur level was varied using an adaptive staircase procedure. In this way, the blur threshold for which the 2D and 3D image contained perceptually the same amount of detail could be found. Our results show that the 3D image needed to be blurred more than the 2D image. This confirms the earlier qualitative findings that 3D images contain perceptually more details than 2D images with the same spatial resolution