Leveraging stereopsis for saliency analysis

Stereopsis provides an additional depth cue and plays an important role in the human vision system. This paper explores stereopsis for saliency analysis and presents two approaches to stereo saliency detection from stereoscopic images. The first approach computes stereo saliency based on the global disparity contrast in the input image. The second approach leverages domain knowledge in stereoscopic photography. A good stereoscopic image takes care of its disparity distribution to avoid 3D fatigue. Particularly, salient content tends to be positioned in the stereoscopic comfort zone to alleviate the vergence-accommodation conflict. Accordingly, our method computes stereo saliency of an image region based on the distance between its perceived location and the comfort zone. Moreover, we consider objects popping out from the screen salient as these objects tend to catch a viewer's attention. We build a stereo saliency analysis benchmark dataset that contains 1000 stereoscopic images with salient object masks. Our experiments on this dataset show that stereo saliency provides a useful complement to existing visual saliency analysis and our method can successfully detect salient content from images that are difficult for monocular saliency analysis methods.