STABILITY OF BINOCULAR DEPTH-PERCEPTION WITH MOVING HEAD AND EYES

We systematically analyse the binocular disparity field under various eye, head and stimulus positions and orientations. From the literature we know that certain classes of disparity which involve the entire di sparity field (such as those caused by horizontal lateral shift, diffe rential rotation, horizontal scale and horizontal shear between the en tire half-images of a stereogram) lead to relatively poor depth percep tion in the case of limited observation periods. These classes of disp arity are found to be similar to the classes of disparities which are brought about by eye and head movements. Our analysis supports the sug gestion that binocular depth perception is based primarily (for the fi rst few hundred milliseconds) on classes of disparity that do not chan ge as a result of ego-movement. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Lt d.