Unequal weighting of monocular inputs in binocular combination: Implications for the compression of stereoscopic imagery

For efficient storage and transmission of stereoscopic images over bandwidt h-limited channels, compression can be achieved by degrading 1 monocular in put of a stereo pair and maintaining the other at the desired quality. The desired quality of the fused stereoscopic image can be achieved, provided t hat binocular vision assigns greater weight to the nondegraded input. A psy chophysical matching procedure was used to determine if such over-weighting occurred when the monocular degradation included blur or blocking artifact s. Over-weighting of the nondegraded input occurred for blur, but under-wei ghting of the nondegraded input occurred for blockiness. Some participants exhibited ocular dominance, but this did not affect the blur results. The a uthors conclude that blur, but not blockiness, is an acceptable form of mon ocular degradation.