Spatial properties of disparity pooling in human stereo vision

The spatial limits of disparity averaging were investigated using Julesz random dot stereograms with two different depth planes. Such stimuli could be perceived as two separate surfaces, one of which was seen through the transparent veil of the other, but under some conditions the depth of information provided by the two surfaces was pooled and the resulting surface was seen at the average of the local disparities. Two types of model are considered for disparity averaging. In the first, disparity averaging occurs as a consequence of attraction/repulsion effects in the disparity domain or as an interpolation process working on a dense depth map of the image. In the second, disparity averaging is seen as a consequence of monocular spatial filtering of the left and right eye images prior to binocular combination.