A Possible Predictor of Visual Discomfort of Viewing Stereoscopic 3D Maps: The Imbalance of Disparity Distributions

Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) maps provide an accurate 3D representation of terrain texture for the precise perception of Earth’s surface. Visual discomfort on S3D images primarily comes from accommodation-vergence conflict, which is related to disparity (the distance between two corresponding points in the left and right stereo images). Previous studies have identified that disparity characteristics are related to visual discomfort. However, the relation between disparity characteristics and visual discomfort has not been investigated in orthographic S3D maps. It is unknown whether disparity characteristics are good indicators of visual discomfort regarding S3D maps. This study proposed a new visual discomfort predictor and compared it to the disparity characteristics already existing in the IEEE standard 3333.1.1™-2015. The comparisons indicate that the imbalance index can be a good predictor of visual discomfort regarding S3D maps. The predictor will be used in a personalized computational model to predict visual discomfort.