Our eyes are horizontally separated in the head by approximately 6.5cm. As a result of this separation there are subtle differences in the position of corresponding image points within the two eyes. The horizontal component of this binocular positional difference is termed horizontal disparity. Horizontal disparity is an important visual cue as once scaled with an estimate of the viewing distance, it can theoretically provide full metric information about the structure of the world. This thesis will address the issue of how binocular visual cues are used by the human visual system for the estimation of three-dimensional (3-D) shape for perception and visuomotor control. The research presented is particularly focused on understanding why biases in the perception of 3-D shape from binocular cues are found, their importance for perception and visuomotor control and how these biases may be overcome by combining binocular cues with other sources of visual information.

O desenvolvimento da realidade virtual permitiu experimentos psicofísicos inéditos, como o aqui descrito, cujo objetivo foi investigar a microgênese da percepção visual de profundidade decorrente de disparidade binocular. Tais processos ocorrem em etapas, com construção gradual do percepto. Experimentos já indicavam a percepção da profundidade em etapas precoces do processamento visual. Isso é confirmado neste trabalho, realizado com tecnologia que garante a estimulação visual exclusivamente por disparidade binocular. Para isso, foram desenvolvidos hardware e software específicos que permitem o controle preciso dos tempos de estimulação binocular e a medida confiável de tempos de reação. Resultado significativo deste trabalho foi também a validação dessas ferramentas, possibilitando estudos futuros de psicofísica em realidade virtual. Finalmente, são sugeridas as cautelas necessárias em experimentos dessa natureza, tanto para a proteção dos participantes contra condições desconfortáveis ou aversivas, como para a seleção de participantes sem déficits funcionais de estereopsia. / Virtual reality technology opened up the possibility of novel psychophysiscal investigations. This work describes a research on the microgenesis of depth perception, as induced exclusively by binocular disparity. Such processes occur in early stages, whereby the percept is gradually built. Previous experiments indicated that depth perception is perceived in early stages of visual processing. This conclusion is now confirmed by the present work, carried out with a technology that guarantees visual stimulation exclusively by binocular disparity. Specific hardware and software were developed, to permit accurate timing of binocular stimulation and reliable measurements of reaction time. A significant result of the present work was the validation of these new tools. Finally, the results also allow suggesting the precautions necessary in the execution of experiments of this type, both to protect participants from possibly uncomfortable or aversive situations, and also to select participants without functional stereopsis deficits.

Purpose: To explore new methodologies to quantify binocular interactions and shed light on their possible neural generators. Methods: Binocular inhibition (BI) was experimentally produced in 40 visually healthy subjects by inserting a series of neutral density (ND) filters in front of one eye. Visual evoked potentials were recorded with stimuli tuned for check size, location and contrast. The Pulfrich effect was investigated using computerized pendulums. Results: Stimulus parameters required to generate maximal BI differ from those for maximal binocular summation (BS). The phase shift required to reverse the Pulfrich effect was proportional to the strength of the ND filter used, and the implicit time measured with VEPs and calculated with the PE correlate. Conclusion: It appears separate neural generators are responsible for BI and BS.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2006. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 94 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-94).

The problem of estimating depth from two or more images is a fundamental problem in computer vision, which is commonly referred as to stereo matching. The applications of stereo matching range from 3D reconstruction to autonomous robot navigation. Stereo matching is particularly attractive for applications in real life because of its simplicity and low cost, especially compared to costly laser range finders/scanners, such as for the case of 3D reconstruction. However, stereo matching has its very unique problems like convergence issues in the optimisation methods, and challenges to find matches accurately due to changes in lighting conditions, occluded areas, noisy images, etc. It is precisely because of these challenges that stereo matching continues to be a very active field of research. In this thesis we develop a binocular stereo matching algorithm that works with rectified images (i.e. scan lines in two images are aligned) to find a real valued displacement (i.e. disparity) that best matches two pixels. To accomplish this our research has developed techniques to efficiently explore a 3D space, compare potential matches, and an inference algorithm to assign the optimal disparity to each pixel in the image. The proposed approach is also extended to the trinocular case. In particular, the trinocular extension deals with a binocular set of images captured at the same time and a third image displaced in time. This approach is referred as to t +1 trinocular stereo matching, and poses the challenge of recovering camera motion, which is addressed by a novel technique we call baseline recovery. We have extensively validated our binocular and trinocular algorithms using the well known KITTI and Middlebury data sets. The performance of our algorithms is consistent across different data sets, and its performance is among the top performers in the KITTI and Middlebury datasets.

Orientador: Clesio Luis Tozzi / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Eletrica e de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-10T17:08:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Nogueira_FernandoMarquesdeAlmeida_D.pdf: 5973806 bytes, checksum: ec2975af264084ab2665aa65eca49541 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007 / Resumo: Este trabalho apresenta uma nova abordagem iterativa e hierárquica para a obtenção de mapas densos de disparidade, a partir de um par de imagens estereoscópicas retificadas, na qual oclusões são explicitamente identificadas. Esta abordagem se fundamenta num processo de busca hierárquica onde são determinados pares homólogos prioritários sobre os quais é aplicada a Injunção de Ordem. Pares homólogos prioritários consistem nos pontos que apresentam a propriedade de Correspondência Bidirecional para o maior número de janelas de busca organizadas em ordem crescente de tamanho. A aplicação da Injunção de Ordem aos pares homólogos prioritários elimina, já nas primeiras iterações, uma grande quantidade de correspondências ambíguas aumentando o índice de acertos e reduzindo o tempo de processamento. A abordagem proposta destaca-se pela utilização de apenas dois parâmetros que devem ser fornecidos a priori de maneira empírica: o tamanho inicial da janela e o número de níveis hierárquicos. A eficiência do algoritmo proposto foi avaliada a partir de imagens reais e simuladas e os resultados comparados com outras abordagens descritas na literatura / Abstract: This work presents a new hierarchical and iterative approach to obtain dense disparity maps from a pair of rectified stereoscopic images in which occlusions are explicitly identified. This approach is based on a process of hierarchical searching where priority matches are determined and upon which is applied the Order Constraint. Priority matches consist of points that present a property of Bidirectional Correspondence for the greatest number of searching windows, these ones organized in a size ascending order. The Order Constraint application on the priority matches eliminates, usually after the first iterations, a lot of ambiguous matches, increasing the rate of true matches and reducing the execution time. The proposed approach stands out by using only two parameters that must be provided a priori in an empirical way: the initial window size and the number of hierarquical levels. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm was evaluated using real and simulated images and the results were compared to other approaches described in the literature / Doutorado / Automação / Doutor em Engenharia Elétrica

O desenvolvimento da realidade virtual permitiu experimentos psicofísicos inéditos, como o aqui descrito, cujo objetivo foi investigar a microgênese da percepção visual de profundidade decorrente de disparidade binocular. Tais processos ocorrem em etapas, com construção gradual do percepto. Experimentos já indicavam a percepção da profundidade em etapas precoces do processamento visual. Isso é confirmado neste trabalho, realizado com tecnologia que garante a estimulação visual exclusivamente por disparidade binocular. Para isso, foram desenvolvidos hardware e software específicos que permitem o controle preciso dos tempos de estimulação binocular e a medida confiável de tempos de reação. Resultado significativo deste trabalho foi também a validação dessas ferramentas, possibilitando estudos futuros de psicofísica em realidade virtual. Finalmente, são sugeridas as cautelas necessárias em experimentos dessa natureza, tanto para a proteção dos participantes contra condições desconfortáveis ou aversivas, como para a seleção de participantes sem déficits funcionais de estereopsia. / Virtual reality technology opened up the possibility of novel psychophysiscal investigations. This work describes a research on the microgenesis of depth perception, as induced exclusively by binocular disparity. Such processes occur in early stages, whereby the percept is gradually built. Previous experiments indicated that depth perception is perceived in early stages of visual processing. This conclusion is now confirmed by the present work, carried out with a technology that guarantees visual stimulation exclusively by binocular disparity. Specific hardware and software were developed, to permit accurate timing of binocular stimulation and reliable measurements of reaction time. A significant result of the present work was the validation of these new tools. Finally, the results also allow suggesting the precautions necessary in the execution of experiments of this type, both to protect participants from possibly uncomfortable or aversive situations, and also to select participants without functional stereopsis deficits.

In the past decade, considerable attention has been paid to examination of the impact of amblyopia, and strabismus, upon the lives of the individuals. Although an extensive amount of literature exists regarding amblyopia and its associated visual defects, little is known about the contribution of the amblyopic eye in the habitual viewing condition (i.e. both eyes viewing). The purpose of these studies was to determine whether amblyopes are disadvantaged in the performance of tasks under habitual viewing conditions, highlighting any functional differences which may exist as a consequence of amblyopia. Secondly, the work aimed to investigate whether the amblyopic eye contributes to the habitual performance of these tasks. A simple light detection task, in a dichoptic arrangement based upon blue/yellow stimuli viewed through yellow filters, was used to investigate the above two aims and investigate the degree of interocular suppression in amblyopic participants. Using a 3D motion analysis system performance was assessed for an obstacle crossing task (adaptive gait) and a task of reaching for and grasping of an isolated object and in a 'cluttered' environment. Fine motor skills were assessed in a threading a needle task. On the whole it was found that amblyopes are not disadvantaged under habitual viewing conditions, and in cases where differences were found to exist this appeared to be in tasks requiring speed and accuracy. Consistently across all studies it was found that the amblyopic eye contributed in a positive manner, thus, as in visual normals, two eyes are better than one.

We present here SOUL: the Single conjugated adaptive Optics Upgrade for LBT. Soul will upgrade the wavefront sensors replacing the existing CCD detector with an EMCCD camera and the rest of the system in order to enable the closed loop operations at a faster cycle rate and with higher number of slopes. Thanks to reduced noise, higher number of pixel and framerate, we expect a gain (for a given SR) around 1.5-2 magnitudes at all wavelengths in the range 7.5 <mR <18. The correction at short wavelength will be greatly improved (SR>70% in I-band and 0.6asec seeing) and the sky coverage will be multiplied by a factor 5 at all galactic latitudes. Upgrading the SCAO systems at all the 4 focal stations, SOUL will provide these benefits in 2017 to the LBTI interferometer and in 2018 to the 2 LUCI NIR spectro-imagers. In the same year the SOUL correction will be exploited also by the new generation of LBT instruments: V-SHARK, SHARK-NIR and iLocater.

visão estereoscópica é uma ferramenta antiga da Computação Gráfica, porém pouco explorada na geração de ambientes virtuais. Ela mostra ser extremamente poderosa para gerar imersões e visualização de objetos em 3D. Neste trabalho foram investigados os conceitos de estereoscopia para imagens estáticas, utilizando a técnica de pontos aleatórios. Através desta investigação, pôde-se extrair informações para auxiliar no desenvolvimento de sistemas não estáticos, utilizando-se esse técnica. Para verificar os resultados obtidos, foi gerado um protótipo para a confecção de estereogramas, onde é permitido, ao operador, alterar algumas configurações, de modo a melhor adaptar as características individuais dos usuários.