Binocular disparity is the input to stereopsis, which is a very strong depth cue in humans. However, the distribution of binocular disparities in natural environments has not been quantitatively measured. In this study, we converted distances from accurate range maps of forest scenes and indoor scenes into the disparities that an observer would encounter, given an eye model and fixation distanc...

Contrast thresholds for stereoscopic depth identification (crossed or uncrossed) were measured as a function of disparity using isoluminant (red-green) and isochromatic (yellow-black) 0.5 c/deg Gabor patches. For the purposes of comparison stimulus contrasts were scaled by their respective detection thresholds. The detection thresholds employed were computed from the monocular detection thresho...

Our eyes capture different 2-D images of the objects around us and our brain uses these images to recover a description of the 3-D structure of the environ­ ment. Stereopsis is the process responsible for this reconstruction of the depth dimension in our visual world. Since Wheatstone invented the stereoscope in 1 838, the processes underlying primate stereo vision have been intensively studied...

Vision exploits multiple sources of optical information to specify the three-dimensional layout of objects and their surfaces. One of these sources is stereoscopic visionöthe strong, immediate sense of 3-D provided by the slight parallax differences between left-eye and right-eye views (Wheatstone 1838). The very keen sense of depth (Ogle 1964) and 3-D shape (Julesz 1971) from stereopsis provid...

By limiting stereopsis to measuring the distance of moving objects against a stationary background, insects can employ simple stratagems for solving the problems of stereoscopic range finding.