PARALLAX ADJUSTMENT FOR REALISTIC 3D STEREO VIEWING OF A SINGLE REMOTE SENSING IMAGE

3D stereoscopic viewing of large scale imagery, such as aerial photography and satellite images, needs different parallaxes relative to the display scale. For example, when a viewer sees a stereoscopic image of aerial photography, the optimal parallax of its zoom-in image should be smaller than that of its zoom-out. Therefore, relative parallax adjustment according to the display scale is required. Merely adjusting the spacing between stereo images is not appropriate because the depths of the whole image are either exaggerated or reduced entirely. This paper focuses on the improving stereoscopic viewing with a single remote sensing image and a digital surface model (DSM). We present the parallax adjustment technique to maximize the 3D realistic effect and the visual comfort. For remote sensing data, DSM height value can be regarded as disparity. There are two possible kinds of methods to adjust the relative parallax with a single image performance. One is the DSM compression technique: the other is an adjustment of the distance between the original image and its stereo-mate. In our approach, we carried out a test to evaluate the optimal distance between a single remote sensing image and its stereo-mate, relative to the viewing scale. Several synthetic stereo-mates according to certain viewing scale were created using a parallel projection model and their anaglyphs were estimated visually. The occlusion of the synthetic stereo-mate was restored by the inpainting method using the fields of experts (FoE) model. With the experiments using QuickBird imagery, we could obtain stereoscopic images with optimized parallax at varied display scales.