UC San Diego

A Stereoscopic display enables viewers to see depth by showing horizontally shifted images to their left and right eye. This horizontal shift of the images with respect to one another is noted as disparity. When the brain fuses the left-eye and right-eye images into a single image, the amount of disparity creates different depth perception where the greater the disparity is the closer the object appears to be to the viewer. Since the left-eye and right-eye images are different, the complete separation of the left-eye and right-eye images in stereoscopic displays is the most critical condition for depth to be perceived properly. If the left eye sees the left-eye image as well as some portion of the right-eye image, and vice versa, then this result is crosstalk and produces undesirable 3D artifacts. With crosstalk, objects become blurry and double-edged which hinders the fusion of the left-eye and right-eye images and significantly degrades depth perception. In addition, watching stereoscopic displays with crosstalk for a long time causes increased eye pressure and even nausea in the viewer.

In this work, we focus on two types of stereoscopic displays: active 3D LCD with shutter glasses and circularly-polarized 3D LCD with passive glasses which are the main-stream 3D displays in the consumers' market. Initially, we built the display model from the optical characteristics. For active 3D LCD, the model captures the temporal response of liquid crystal. For passive 3D LCD, the model is based on the polarization of light. Afterwards, we compare the simulation of the model with real displays to verify the accuracy of the modeling. Next, we analyze the temporal change of crosstalk in active 3D LCDs and the spatial change of crosstalk in passive 3D LCDs. Then, the proposed modeling includes the polarizing system and vertical misalignment in the LCD panel. In addition, we analyze how crosstalk changes with the image content including image contrast, texture, and at different viewing angles and head posts. Furthermore, we proposed effective crosstalk reduction methods that reduces crosstalk while preserving the image quality. Lastly, we conducted experimental study to find the relationship between motion and crosstalk visibility.