The great success of the three-dimensional (3D) digital cinema industry has opened up a new era of 3D content services. While we have witnessed a rapid surge of stereoscopic 3D services, the issue of viewing safety remains a possible obstacle to the widespread deployment of such services. In this paper, we propose a novel disparity remapping method to reduce the visual discomfort induced by fast change in disparity. The proposed remapping approach selectively adjusts the disparities of the discomfort regions where the fast change in disparity occurs. To this purpose, the proposed approach detects visual importance regions in a stereoscopic 3D video, which may have dominant influence on visual comfort in video frames, and then locally adjust the disparity by taking into account the disparity changes in the visual importance regions. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach to adjust local problematic regions can improve visual comfort while preserving naturalness of the scene. © (2013) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).