Patent ID: 8228370

Claim:
A stereoscopic image shooting and display system enabling observation of a stereoscopic image of an object to be observed, comprising: a left-right pair of image pickup sections having a left-right pair of optical systems with a parallax; an image processing section which performs predetermined image processing on left and right images picked up through the left-right pair of image pickup sections and parallactically different from each other, and outputs the processed images to a display section which displays images; the image processing section having a measurement section having at least a function to make a stereoscopic measurement on the object to be observed, a detection section which, when the left and right images parallactically different from each other are displayed as a stereoscopic image through the display section, detects the existence/nonexistence of a difficult-to-observe region in the stereoscopic image on the basis of results obtained through the measurement section, and an image treatment section which performs a predetermined image treatment on the left and right images picked up through the image pickup sections and parallactically different from each other; and a control section which, when the difficult-to-observe region is detected through the detection section, controls the image pickup sections or the image processing section so that image display on the display section is performed by changing the detected difficult-to-observe state in the difficult-to-observe region into an easy-to-observe state, in a state where the distance between the optical axes of the left-right pair of optical systems with a parallax is fixed.