Evaluation of stereoscopic 3D displays for image analysis tasks

In many application domains the analysis of aerial or satellite images plays an important role. The use of stereoscopic display technologies can enhance the image analyst's ability to detect or to identify certain objects of interest, which results in a higher performance. Changing image acquisition from analog to digital techniques entailed the change of stereoscopic visualisation techniques. Recently different kinds of digital stereoscopic display techniques with affordable prices have appeared on the market. At Fraunhofer IITB usability tests were carried out to find out (1) with which kind of these commercially available stereoscopic display techniques image analysts achieve the best performance and (2) which of these techniques achieve a high acceptance. First, image analysts were interviewed to define typical image analysis tasks which were expected to be solved with a higher performance using stereoscopic display techniques. Next, observer experiments were carried out whereby image analysts had to solve defined tasks with different visualization techniques. Based on the experimental results (performance parameters and qualitative subjective evaluations of the used display techniques) two of the examined stereoscopic display technologies were found to be very good and appropriate.