New stereoscopic video shooting rule based on stereoscopic distortion parameters and comfortable viewing zone

Human binocular depth perception, the most important element brought by 3DTV, is proved to be closely connected to not only the content acquisition (camera focal length, camera baseline and etc.) but also the viewing environment (viewing distance, screen size and etc.). Conventional 3D stereography rule in the literature usually consider the general viewing condition and basic human factors to guide the content acquisition, such as assuming human inter-pupil baseline as the maximum disparity. A lot of new elements or problems of stereoscopic viewing was not considered or precisely defined so that advanced shooting rule is needed to guarantee the overall quality of stereoscopic video. In this paper, we proposed a new stereoscopic video shooting rule considering two most important issues in 3DTV: stereoscopic distortion and comfortable viewing zone. Firstly, a mathematic model mapping the camera space to visualization space is established in order to geometrically estimate the stereoscopic depth distortion. Depth and shape distortion factors are defined and used to describe the stereoscopic distortion. Secondly, comfortable viewing zone (or Depth of focus) is considered to reduce the problem of visual discomfort and visual fatigue. The new shooting rule is to optimize the camera parameters (focal length, camera baseline and etc.) in order to control depth and shape distortion and also guarantee that the perceived scene is located in comfortable viewing zone as possible. However, in some scenarios, the above two conditions cannot be fulfill simultaneously, even sometimes contradict with each other so that priority should be decided. In this paper, experimental stereoscopic synthetic content generation with various sets of camera parameters and various sets of scenes representing different depth range are presented. Justification of the proposed new shooting rule is based on 3D concepts (depth rendering, visual comfort and visual experience) subjective video assessment. The results of this study will provide a new method to propose camera parameters based on management of new criteria (shape distortion and depth of focus) in order to produce optimized stereoscopic images and videos.