Stereoscopic 3D Depth Perception Analysis of H.264/AVC Coded Video

Compared to two single-view videos, stereoscopic three dimensional (S3D) videos provide a single most significant feature and a major difference, i.e. depth perception. However, the compression, transmission, and storage of 3D videos will inevitably introduce spatiotemporal and stereoscopic distortions, which may cause loss and/or variations of depth perception, resulting in visual discomfort to viewers. Nevertheless, the study remains limited of how these distortions affect the depth perception and how the human vision system (HVS) perceives such loss and variations of depth perception in compressed 3D videos. In this paper, a series of subjective experiments have been constructed to investigate the visual impact of video compression by the H.264/AVC standard on 3D depth perception. Especially, different frequency components of the compressed videos were extracted to examine their impact on depth perception. The subjective experiments reveal that the degradation of video quality as a result of compression will cause the loss and reduction of the 3D depth perception. Moreover, the subjective data showed that the HVS response in depth perception varies depending on different frequency components of 3D videos, which may bring about a better understanding of human stereoscopic vision, and coding and quality assessment of 3D videos.