Recovery of 3-D shape from binocular disparity and structure from motion

Four experiments were conducted to examine the integration of depth information from binocular stereopsis and structure from motion (SFM), using stereograms simulating transparent cylindrical objects. We found that the judged depth increased when either rotational or translational motion was added to a display, but the increase was greater for rotating (SFM) displays. Judged depth decreased as texture element density increased for static and translating stereo displays, but it stayed relatively constant for rotating displays. This result indicates that SFM may facilitate stereo processing by helping to resolve the stereo correspondence problem. Overall, the results from these experiments provide evidence for a cooperative relationship between SFM and binocular disparity in the recovery of 3-D relationships from 2-D images. These findings indicate that the processing of depth information from SFM and binocular disparity is not strictly modular, and thus theories of combining visual information that assume strong modularity or independence cannot accurately characterize all instances of depth perception from multiple sources.