Visual quality in stereoscopic 3DTV

Georgia Tech has an ongoing research program in multimedia communications, including visual quality assessment in 3DTV. As part of our 3D related research, we have studied the response of the human visual system to compressed 3D sequences and compared the visibility of artifacts in 3D and 2D views (individual left-eye and right-eye views) over a broad range of bitrates. Using mean opinion score (MOS) as the metric, we have conducted subjective tests as well as HVS-tuned objective measurements needed to perform the 2D vs 3D comparison. Our initial results show that there exists a bitrate threshold above which compression artifacts tend to get suppressed in the 3D view when compared to the 2D view. Our tests also show that this artifact suppression threshold is content dependent.