User, metric, and computational evaluation of foveated rendering methods

Swafford, Nicholas T.; Iglesias-Guitian, Jos� A.; Koniaris, Charalampos; Moon, Bochang; Cosker, Darren; Mitchell, Kenny

Abstract

Perceptually lossless foveated rendering methods exploit human perception by selectively rendering at different quality levels based on eye gaze (at a lower computational cost) while still maintaining the user's perception of a full quality render. We consider three foveated rendering methods and propose practical rules of thumb for each method to achieve significant performance gains in real-time rendering frameworks. Additionally, we contribute a new metric for perceptual foveated rendering quality building on HDR-VDP2 that, unlike traditional metrics, considers the loss of fidelity in peripheral vision by lowering the contrast sensitivity of the model with visual eccentricity based on the Cortical Magnification Factor (CMF). The new metric is parameterized on user-test data generated in this study. Finally, we run our metric on a novel foveated rendering method for real-time immersive 360° content with motion parallax.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (Published)
• Conference Name: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception - SAP '16
• Start Date: Jul 22, 2016
• End Date: Jul 24, 2016
• Acceptance Date: Apr 2, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Jul 22, 2016
• Publication Date: Jul 22, 2016
• Deposit Date: Dec 12, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 14, 2017
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Book Title: SAP '16 Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception
• Chapter Number: n/a
• ISBN: 9781450343831
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2931002.2931011
• Keywords: Concepts, computing methodologies, Perception, virtual reality,
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/951514
• Contract Date: Dec 12, 2017