310 research outputs found
Smoothness perception : investigation of beat rate effect on frame rate perception
Despite the complexity of the Human Visual System (HVS), research over the last few decades has highlighted a number of its limitations. These limitations can be exploited in computer graphics to significantly reduce computational cost and thus required rendering time, without a viewer perceiving any difference in resultant image quality. Furthermore, cross-modal interaction between different modalities, such as the influence of audio on visual perception, has also been shown as significant both in psychology and computer graphics. In this paper we investigate the effect of beat rate on temporal visual perception, i.e. frame rate perception. For the visual quality and perception evaluation, a series of psychophysical experiments was conducted and the data analysed. The results indicate that beat rates in some cases do affect temporal visual perception and that certain beat rates can be used in order to reduce the amount of rendering required to achieve a perceptual high quality. This is another step towards a comprehensive understanding of auditory-visual cross-modal interaction and could be potentially used in high-fidelity interactive multi-sensory virtual environments
Auditory-visual interaction in computer graphics
Generating high-fidelity images in real-time at reasonable frame rates, still remains one of the main challenges in computer graphics. Furthermore, visuals
remain only one of the multiple sensory cues that are required to be delivered
simultaneously in a multi-sensory virtual environment. The most frequently used
sense, besides vision, in virtual environments and entertainment, is audio. While
the rendering community focuses on solving the rendering equation more quickly
using various algorithmic and hardware improvements, the exploitation of human
limitations to assist in this process remain largely unexplored.
Many findings in the research literature prove the existence of physical and
psychological limitations of humans, including attentional, perceptual and limitations of the Human Sensory System (HSS). Knowledge of the Human Visual
System (HVS) may be exploited in computer graphics to significantly reduce
rendering times without the viewer being aware of any resultant image quality
difference. Furthermore, cross-modal effects, that is the influence of one sensory
input on another, for example sound and visuals, have also recently been shown
to have a substantial impact on viewer perception of virtual environment.
In this thesis, auditory-visual cross-modal interaction research findings have
been investigated and adapted to graphics rendering purposes. The results from
five psychophysical experiments, involving 233 participants, showed that, even in
the realm of computer graphics, there is a strong relationship between vision and
audition in both spatial and temporal domains. The first experiment, investigating the auditory-visual cross-modal interaction within spatial domain, showed
that unrelated sound effects reduce perceived rendering quality threshold. In
the following experiments, the effect of audio on temporal visual perception was
investigated. The results obtained indicate that audio with certain beat rates
can be used in order to reduce the amount of rendering required to achieve a
perceptual high quality. Furthermore, introducing the sound effect of footsteps
to walking animations increased the visual smoothness perception. These results
suggest that for certain conditions the number of frames that need to be rendered each second can be reduced, saving valuable computation time, without
the viewer being aware of this reduction. This is another step towards a comprehensive understanding of auditory-visual cross-modal interaction and its use in
high-fidelity interactive multi-sensory virtual environments
The influence of olfaction on the perception of high-fidelity computer graphics
The computer graphics industry is constantly demanding more realistic images and
animations. However, producing such high quality scenes can take a long time, even
days, if rendering on a single PC. One of the approaches that can be used to speed
up rendering times is Visual Perception, which exploits the limitations of the Human
Visual System, since the viewers of the results will be humans. Although there
is an increasing body of research into how haptics and sound may affect a viewer's
perception in a virtual environment, the in
uence of smell has been largely ignored.
The aim of this thesis is to address this gap and make smell an integral part of
multi-modal virtual environments.
In this work, we have performed four major experiments, with a total of 840 participants.
In the experiments we used still images and animations, related and
unrelated smells and finally, a multi-modal environment was considered with smell,
sound and temperature. Beside this, we also investigated how long it takes for an
average person to adapt to smell and what affect there may be when performing a
task in the presence of a smell.
The results of this thesis clearly show that a smell present in the environment
firstly affects the perception of object quality within a rendered image, and secondly,
enables parts of the scene or the whole animation to be selectively rendered in high
quality while the rest can be rendered in a lower quality without the viewer noticing
the drop in quality. Such selective rendering in the presence of smell results in
significant computational performance gains without any loss in the quality of the
image or animations perceived by a viewer
Visual attention models and applications to 3D computer graphics
Ankara : The Department of Computer Engineering and the Graduate School of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2012.Thesis (Ph. D.) -- Bilkent University, 2012.Includes bibliographical refences.3D computer graphics, with the increasing technological and computational
opportunities, have advanced to very high levels that it is possible to generate very
realistic computer-generated scenes in real-time for games and other interactive
environments. However, we cannot claim that computer graphics research has
reached to its limits. Rendering photo-realistic scenes still cannot be achieved in
real-time; and improving visual quality and decreasing computational costs are
still research areas of great interest.
Recent e orts in computer graphics have been directed towards exploiting
principles of human visual perception to increase visual quality of rendering.
This is natural since in computer graphics, the main source of evaluation is the
judgment of people, which is based on their perception. In this thesis, our aim is
to extend the use of perceptual principles in computer graphics. Our contribution
is two-fold: First, we present several models to determine the visually important,
salient, regions in a 3D scene. Secondly, we contribute to use of de nition of
saliency metrics in computer graphics.
Human visual attention is composed of two components, the rst component
is the stimuli-oriented, bottom-up, visual attention; and the second component
is task-oriented, top-down visual attention. The main di erence between these
components is the role of the user. In the top-down component, viewer's intention
and task a ect perception of the visual scene as opposed to the bottom-up component.
We mostly investigate the bottom-up component where saliency resides.
We de ne saliency computation metrics for two types of graphical contents.
Our rst metric is applicable to 3D mesh models that are possibly animating, and
it extracts saliency values for each vertex of the mesh models. The second metric we propose is applicable to animating objects and nds visually important objects
due to their motion behaviours. In a third model, we present how to adapt the
second metric for the animated 3D meshes.
Along with the metrics of saliency, we also present possible application areas
and a perceptual method to accelerate stereoscopic rendering, which is based on
binocular vision principles and makes use of saliency information in a stereoscopic
rendering scene.
Each of the proposed models are evaluated with formal experiments. The
proposed saliency metrics are evaluated via eye-tracker based experiments and
the computationally salient regions are found to attract more attention in practice
too. For the stereoscopic optimization part, we have performed a detailed
experiment and veri ed our model of optimization.
In conclusion, this thesis extends the use of human visual system principles
in 3D computer graphics, especially in terms of saliency.Bülbül, Muhammed AbdullahPh.D
Image synthesis based on a model of human vision
Modern computer graphics systems are able to construct renderings of such high quality that viewers are deceived into regarding the images as coming from a photographic source. Large amounts of computing resources are expended in this rendering process, using complex mathematical models of lighting and shading.
However, psychophysical experiments have revealed that viewers only regard certain informative regions within a presented image. Furthermore, it has been shown that these visually important regions contain low-level visual feature differences that attract the attention of the viewer.
This thesis will present a new approach to image synthesis that exploits these experimental findings by modulating the spatial quality of image regions by their visual importance. Efficiency gains are therefore reaped, without sacrificing much of the perceived quality of the image. Two tasks must be undertaken to achieve this goal. Firstly, the design of an appropriate region-based model of visual importance, and secondly, the modification of progressive rendering techniques to effect an importance-based rendering approach.
A rule-based fuzzy logic model is presented that computes, using spatial feature differences, the relative visual importance of regions in an image. This model improves upon previous work by incorporating threshold effects induced by global feature difference distributions and by using texture concentration measures.
A modified approach to progressive ray-tracing is also presented. This new approach uses the visual importance model to guide the progressive refinement of an image. In addition, this concept of visual importance has been incorporated into supersampling, texture mapping and computer animation techniques. Experimental results are presented, illustrating the efficiency gains reaped from using this method of progressive rendering.
This visual importance-based rendering approach is expected to have applications in the entertainment industry, where image fidelity may be sacrificed for efficiency purposes, as long as the overall visual impression of the scene is maintained. Different aspects of the approach should find many other applications in image compression, image retrieval, progressive data transmission and active robotic vision
Blickpunktabhängige Computergraphik
Contemporary digital displays feature multi-million pixels at ever-increasing refresh rates. Reality, on the other hand, provides us with a view of the world that is continuous in space and time. The discrepancy between viewing the physical world and its sampled depiction on digital displays gives rise to perceptual quality degradations. By measuring or estimating where we look, gaze-contingent algorithms aim at exploiting the way we visually perceive to remedy visible artifacts. This dissertation presents a variety of novel gaze-contingent algorithms and respective perceptual studies. Chapter 4 and 5 present methods to boost perceived visual quality of conventional video footage when viewed on commodity monitors or projectors. In Chapter 6 a novel head-mounted display with real-time gaze tracking is described. The device enables a large variety of applications in the context of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Using the gaze-tracking VR headset, a novel gaze-contingent render method is described in Chapter 7. The gaze-aware approach greatly reduces computational efforts for shading virtual worlds. The described methods and studies show that gaze-contingent algorithms are able to improve the quality of displayed images and videos or reduce the computational effort for image generation, while display quality perceived by the user does not change.Moderne digitale Bildschirme ermöglichen immer höhere Auflösungen bei ebenfalls steigenden Bildwiederholraten. Die Realität hingegen ist in Raum und Zeit kontinuierlich. Diese Grundverschiedenheit führt beim Betrachter zu perzeptuellen Unterschieden. Die Verfolgung der Aug-Blickrichtung ermöglicht blickpunktabhängige Darstellungsmethoden, die sichtbare Artefakte verhindern können. Diese Dissertation trägt zu vier Bereichen blickpunktabhängiger und wahrnehmungstreuer Darstellungsmethoden bei. Die Verfahren in Kapitel 4 und 5 haben zum Ziel, die wahrgenommene visuelle Qualität von Videos für den Betrachter zu erhöhen, wobei die Videos auf gewöhnlicher Ausgabehardware wie z.B. einem Fernseher oder Projektor dargestellt werden. Kapitel 6 beschreibt die Entwicklung eines neuartigen Head-mounted Displays mit Unterstützung zur Erfassung der Blickrichtung in Echtzeit. Die Kombination der Funktionen ermöglicht eine Reihe interessanter Anwendungen in Bezug auf Virtuelle Realität (VR) und Erweiterte Realität (AR). Das vierte und abschließende Verfahren in Kapitel 7 dieser Dissertation beschreibt einen neuen Algorithmus, der das entwickelte Eye-Tracking Head-mounted Display zum blickpunktabhängigen Rendern nutzt. Die Qualität des Shadings wird hierbei auf Basis eines Wahrnehmungsmodells für jeden Bildpixel in Echtzeit analysiert und angepasst. Das Verfahren hat das Potenzial den Berechnungsaufwand für das Shading einer virtuellen Szene auf ein Bruchteil zu reduzieren. Die in dieser Dissertation beschriebenen Verfahren und Untersuchungen zeigen, dass blickpunktabhängige Algorithmen die Darstellungsqualität von Bildern und Videos wirksam verbessern können, beziehungsweise sich bei gleichbleibender Bildqualität der Berechnungsaufwand des bildgebenden Verfahrens erheblich verringern lässt
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