Evaluation of Depth Cues in 3D Subtitling

 

Recent explosion towards 3D content-enabled devices has brought to light many issues regarding user comfort, depth perception and accessibility in media. One important element that touches these areas is subtitling. We define a pipeline to produce extruded texts for evaluating3D subtitling properties (using traditional 2D depth cues). An evaluation of current 3D tools was carried out, and the chosen platform allows us to create 3D typographies with high varied parameters (parallax, lightning). Produced subtitles were tested in full HD stereoscopic video clips. With the resulting subtitled clips, subjective perception tests were performed in order to evaluate the text’s impact on ghosting and readability in different parallax values. The results area set of rules to use when creating 3D subtitles that will provide: (i) better visual comfort, (ii) ghosting reduction (due to color gradient variations and volume), and (iii) an increment of negative parallax positioning with extrusion.