The visual quality of a motion picture is significantly influenced by the choice of the presentation frame rate. Increasing the frame rate improves the clarity of the image and helps to alleviate many artifacts, such as blur, strobing, flicker, or judder. These benefits, however, come at the price of losing well-established film aesthetics, often referred to as the "cinematic look". Current technology leaves artists with a sparse set of choices, e.g., 24 Hz or 48 Hz, limiting the freedom in adjusting the frame rate to artistic needs, content, and display technology. In this paper, we solve this problem by proposing a novel filtering technique which enables emulating the whole spectrum of presentation frame rates on a single-frame-rate display. The key component of our technique is a set of simple yet powerful filters calibrated and evaluated in psychophysical experiments. By varying their parameters we can achieve an impression of continuously varying presentation frame rate in both the spatial and temporal dimensions. This allows artists to achieve the best balance between the aesthetics and the objective quality of the motion picture. Furthermore, we show how our technique, informed by cinematic guidelines, can adapt to the content and achieve this balance automatically.

Current three-dimensional displays cannot fully reproduce all depth cues used by a human observer in the real world. Instead, they create only an illusion of looking at a three-dimensional scene. This leads to a number of challenges during the content creation process. To assure correct depth reproduction and visual comfort, either the acquisition setup has to be carefully controlled or additional postprocessing techniques have to be applied. Furthermore, these manipulations need to account for a particular setup that is used to present the content, for example, viewing distance or screen size. This creates additional challenges in the context of personal use when stereoscopic content is shown on TV sets, desktop monitors, or mobile devices. We address this problem by presenting a new system for streaming stereoscopic content. Its key feature is a computationally efficient depth adjustment technique which can automatically optimize viewing experience for videos of field sports such as soccer, football, and tennis. Additionally, the method enables depth personalization to allow users to adjust the amount of depth according to their preferences. Our stereoscopic video streaming system was implemented, deployed, and tested with real users.

Producing high-quality stereoscopic 3D content requires significantly more effort than preparing regular video footage. In order to assure good depth perception and visual comfort, 3D videos need to be carefully adjusted to specific viewing conditions before they are shown to viewers. While most stereoscopic 3D content is designed for viewing in movie theaters, where viewing conditions do not vary significantly, adapting the same content for viewing on home TV-sets, desktop displays, laptops, and mobile devices requires additional adjustments. To address this challenge, we propose a new system for 3D video streaming that provides automatic depth adjustments as one of its key features. Our system takes into account both the content and the display type in order to customize 3D videos and maximize their perceived quality. We propose a novel method for depth adjustment that is well-suited for videos of field sports such as soccer, football, and tennis. Our method is computationally efficient and it does not introduce any visual artifacts. We have implemented our 3D streaming system and conducted two user studies, which show: (i) adapting stereoscopic 3D videos for different displays is beneficial, and (ii) our proposed system can achieve up to 35% improvement in the perceived quality of the stereoscopic 3D content.

Abstract Presenting stereoscopic content on 3D displays is a challenging task, usually requiring manual adjustments. A number of techniques have been developed to aid this process, but they account for binocular disparity of surfaces that are diffuse and opaque only. However, combinations of transparent as well as specular materials are common in the real and virtual worlds, and pose a significant problem. For example, excessive disparities can be created which cannot be fused by the observer. Also, multiple stereo interpretations become possible, e. g., for glass, that both reflects and refracts, which may confuse the observer and result in poor 3D experience. In this work, we propose an efficient method for analyzing and controlling disparities in computer‐generated images of such scenes where surface positions and a layer decomposition are available. Instead of assuming a single per‐pixel disparity value, we estimate all possibly perceived disparities at each image location. Based on this representation, we define an optimization to find the best per‐pixel camera parameters, assuring that all disparities can be easily fused by a human. A preliminary perceptual study indicates, that our approach combines comfortable viewing with realistic depiction of typical specular scenes.

Abstract Independent management of film grain in each view of a stereoscopic video can lead to visual discomfort. The existing alternative is to project the grain onto the scene geometry. Such grain, however, looks unnatural, changes object perception, and emphasizes inaccuracies in depth arising during 2D‐to‐3D conversion. We propose an advanced method of grain positioning that scatters the grain in the scene space. In a series of perceptual experiments, we estimate the optimal parameter values for the proposed method, analyze the user preference distribution among the proposed and the two existing methods, and show influence of the method on the object perception.

Sudden temporal depth changes, such as cuts that are introduced by video edits, can significantly degrade the quality of stereoscopic content. Since usually not encountered in the real world, they are very challenging for the audience. This is because the eye vergence has to constantly adapt to new disparities in spite of conflicting accommodation requirements. Such rapid disparity changes may lead to confusion, reduced understanding of the scene, and overall attractiveness of the content. In most cases the problem cannot be solved by simply matching the depth around the transition, as this would require flattening the scene completely. To better understand this limitation of the human visual system, we conducted a series of eye-tracking experiments. The data obtained allowed us to derive and evaluate a model describing adaptation of vergence to disparity changes on a stereoscopic display. Besides computing user-specific models, we also estimated parameters of an average observer model. This enables a range of strategies for minimizing the adaptation time in the audience.

Human stereo perception of glossy materials is substantially different from the perception of diffuse surfaces: A single point on a diffuse object appears the same for both eyes, whereas it appears different to both eyes on a specular object. As highlights are blurry reflections of light sources they have depth themselves, which is different from the depth of the reflecting surface. We call this difference in depth impression the "highlight disparity". Due to artistic motivation, for technical reasons, or because of incomplete data, highlights often have to be depicted on-surface, without any disparity. However, it has been shown that a lack of disparity decreases the perceived glossiness and authenticity of a material. To remedy this contradiction, our work introduces a technique for depiction of glossy materials, which improves over simple on-surface highlights, and avoids the problems of physical highlights. Our technique is computationally simple, can be easily integrated in an existing (GPU) shading system, and allows for local and interactive artistic control.